Research Group

Dr. Lauren Biddle
Postdoctoral Researcher
Lauren studies the formation and evolution of planets and their host stars through the lens of planet-disk-star connections. She utilizes ground and space observatories to understand the mechanisms of giant planet assembly and determine their angular momentum architecture to trace their formation and dynamical histories.

Quang Tran
Graduate Student
Quang is working to understand the evolution and migration pathways of hot Jupiters. He is leading a precision radial velocity survey of hot and warm Jupiters around young stars using the Habitable-zone Planet Finder, a newly commissioned near-infrared spectrograph at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope. The ultimate goal is to compare this young population of planets with the old field population to constrain when and how giant planets migrate.


Kyle Franson
Graduate Student
Kyle is using long-baseline astrometric accelerations to study wide orbiting companions. He is using these signals as ``dynamical beacons'' to discover planets and brown dwarf companions, measure their dynamical masses, and use these as tests of substellar evolutionary models.


Marvin Morgan
Graduate Student
Marvin is using the underlying eccentricity distribution of warm Jupiters to understand their past migration and current orbital architectures. The goal of this program is to establish the relative importance of various possible migration channels. His previous work considered how the timing of the giant planet instability was impacted in the early solar system.


Katie Teixeira
Graduate Student
Katie is characterizing planetary systems of nearby Sun-like stars in preparation for future missions to directly image potential Earth-twins. Her current research uses astrometric accelerations combined with radial velocity observations to search for giant planets and brown dwarfs that that may encroach on the habitable zone.


Lillian Jiang
Graduate Student
Lillian's research focuses on the formation of exoplanets and sub-stellar objects using high-contrast imaging and multi-wavelength spectra. Her current project involves identifying accreting protoplanets in star-forming regions to clarify their formation mechanisms and to constrain the occurrence rate of massive giant planets at wide separations.


Claire Finley
Graduate Student
Claire is working to jointly constrain accretion rates and disk properties of wide planets. She is utilizing imaging from the UV to the mid-infrared to characterize these planets and their disks.