I'm a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. I primarily work on the project teams for three missions. I am the Operations Project Scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Deputy Project Scientist for the Pandora Smallest mission, and I am a participating scientist on the ULTRASAT mission.
My primary scientific interests lie in the analysis of data from space and ground-based telescopes to infer properties of exoplanets and their host stars. This has led to a number of major discoveries including the detection of the smallest known planet, the detection of the first super-Earth-sized planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star, and the detection of the first Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of another star.
After my graduate studies, I worked within the Kepler Guest Observer Office at NASA Ames Research Center, California as a research scientist. In 2014, I was promoted to Director of the Kepler/K2 Guest Observer Office. I led a team responsible for developing proposal calls, organizing proposal reviews, providing critical support to the scientific community and developing analysis software for Kepler and K2. I was part of the small team that pioneered the K2 mission, utilizing the Kepler spacecraft after the loss of fine pointing control. I served on the science and mission leadership teams for K2. In 2017 I moved to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland to work on the TESS mission. I initially, served as Deputy Director and then Director of the TESS Guest Investigator Program, and as Associate Project Scientist. I have been a member of the Roman project scientist team since 2022.