Postdoctoral Scholar at UCSB
June 2011 - present
Ph.D. Planetary Science, MIT, 2011
M.S. Geophysics, Stanford, 2006
B.S. Physics, Honors, Stanford, 2006
I am a postdoctoral scholar in the physics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am currently working with Stan Peale on Cassini state dynamics of Mercury and other bodies and with Jack Wisdom on a new formulation of solid-body tides that expresses the tidal displacement as a sum of excited elastic modes. My thesis work was on tidal heating and tidal evolution of solid bodies in the solar system.
In our work on the Cassini state of Mercury, I plan to incorporate dissipation at the core-mantle boundary and investigate the offset in Cassini obliquity that results. Combined with future measurements of the offset (likely by Jean-Luc Margot), this will allow us to constrain the properties of Mercury's core.
In our work on dynamic elastic tides, we have succeeded in reproducing the classic (Mignard tidal model) expressions for tidal dissipation and the resulting semimajor axis, eccentricity, and spin rate evolutions. We have extended these results to arbitrary eccentricity. This tidal formulation is easily extendable to other rheologies, which we are currently working on. We plan to apply our model to several problems in the solar system and to super-Earths.
Previous work includes a study of the precession of the lunar core and implications for lunar magnetism, a coupled thermal-orbital model for the early Moon, and several papers on Enceladus. Please see my research page for more details of my research interests. You can also see my publications page for a list of my relevant publications and work in progress.