I am a postdoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, currently working on the HATNet project, which is a search for transiting planets that orbit bright stars.

The open cluster M37 as seen with the 300 megapixel Megacam camera on the 6.5-m MMT in Arizona. The stars in this cluster are about 550 million years old. That means they formed around the same time that the Cambrian explosion was happening on Earth, not long after the first complex multicellular organisms (our very distant ancestors) started appearing on our planet. Nonetheless, that's pretty young for Sun-like stars considering that the middle-aged Sun is about 8 times older than that. This cluster is located approximately 5000 light years away from us toward the constellation Auriga, more or less in the opposite direction from the Galactic center. Clicking on the image loads a higher resolution version.

Projects:

• Deep MMT Transit Survey of the Open Cluster M37

  For my Ph.D. thesis project I worked on a deep variability survey of the Open Cluster M37. There are a number of people who have contributed to this project, including Scott Gaudi, Matt Holman, Brian McLeod, Kris Stanek, Joe Barranco, and Marc Pinsonneault. We obtained 20 nights of data with the MMT on this cluster with the primary goal of searching for transiting planets as small as Neptune. We are also studying the variable stars in the field of this cluster.
  

• Variable stars in M33

  I have done some work on a survey of M33 using the CFHT telescope (the project is led by David Bersier). There is a color movie of a portion of the galaxy constructed from this survey's data.
  

• Variable Stars in M3

  Another project I did some work on is to create a catalog of variables in M3 using image subtraction. The above link leads to the ftp server hosting the catalog. We have also created a movie of RR Lyrae in M3 which was featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day.
  

• Hungarian Automated Telescope

  This is a project to detect transiting extra-solar planets around bright stars with a network of small telescopes run by Gaspar Bakos. My research exam project with to use data from this survey to publish a Catalog of Variable Stars for a region overlapping the field that will be observed by the Kepler Mission.