Stellar astrophysics

Stars are the closest thing astronomy has to a fundamental particle. They form, they fuse, they enrich their surroundings, and they die — and almost everything else we study, from planets to galaxies, is built from what stars make and leave behind. Most of my research starts here.

I want to know what stars are made of, and how that changes with time. High-resolution spectroscopy lets us measure the detailed chemical composition of a star — the fingerprints of dozens of elements imprinted on its light — and from those abundances we can reconstruct where a star came from and what happened to it along the way.

Some of the questions that motivate me:

• How precisely can we measure stellar parameters and chemical abundances, and what sets the floor on that precision?
• What can a star's surface composition tell us about its interior, its evolutionary state, and its history?
• How do we do this consistently for the millions of stars now being observed by large spectroscopic surveys?

Much of my work involves building data-driven and physically-motivated models that scale to survey-sized datasets without sacrificing the rigour you'd want for a single carefully-studied star.