Current Work

My current work focuses on mission support at the U.S. Naval Observatory, where I develop astronomical tools that support navigation and space situational awareness in GPS-denied environments. I contribute to systems that use telescope observations of Earth-orbiting objects to precisely measure their positions, brightness, and orbits.

This work supports the U.S. Naval Observatory’s role in maintaining the celestial reference frame and enables accurate orbit determination for satellites and other objects in Earth orbit. I develop algorithms, data-processing pipelines, and analysis tools that transform raw telescope observations into high-precision orbital information. My work contributes to critical capabilities in space domain awareness, space traffic management, and precise navigation and timing.

Past Research

My past research explored how the most massive stars in the Universe are born. These stars form under extreme conditions such as very high temperatures and densities, strong shocks, and turbulent gas clouds. Such environments are commonly found in super star clusters, rare and compact regions that shine millions of times brighter than the Sun and contain hundreds of massive stars forming at once.

To study these environments, I used a combination of archival data and new observations from some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. These included ground-based facilities such as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, Gemini South Adaptive Optics Imager, as well as space-based observatories including Spitzer, Hubble, and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Together, these observations allowed me to examine star-forming regions in nearby galaxies in unprecedented detail.

JWST, in particular, represented a major leap forward. Its instruments are far more sensitive and offer much sharper images than earlier space telescopes, making it possible to study star formation on extremely small scales in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way. For the first time, we were able to resolve structures smaller than a tenth of a parse, comparable to the size of individual stellar nurseries.

Using JWST observations, I identified the object H72.97–69.39 as a newly formed super star cluster containing more than 1,500 forming stars in its immediate surroundings. At less than 100,000 years old, it is the youngest known super star cluster in the local Universe. Follow-up imaging and spectroscopy revealed deeply embedded, still-forming stars surrounded by ice- and dust-rich material, offering a rare glimpse into the earliest stages of massive star formation.

This work used H72.97–69.39 as a nearby example of how massive stars and star clusters may have formed during the Universe’s peak era of star formation, billions of years ago, when galaxies were rapidly building their stellar populations.