Where am I and what am I doing?

I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), supervised by Michele Bannister with associate supervisors Samantha Lawler and Alex Parker. My research involves using survey simulators to model the expected detections of various small Solar System body populations by different in order to improve our understanding of their intrinsic populations.

At the moment, I am working on demonstrating the benefits of Bayesian inference for constraining intrinsic population parameters for small Solar System bodies, specifically interstellar objects.

Involvements

~ LSST Solar System Science Collaboration member

~ Comet Interceptor mission team member

Recent Publications

Dorsey et al. (2023): Applying the OSSOS survey simulator to a population of theoretically stable Centaurs between Uranus and Neptune to estimate a population size upper limit.

Schwamb et al. (2023): A summary of the LSST Solar System Science Collaboration’s perspective and conclusions regarding the optimisation of the LSST observing cadence.

Previous Research Projects

The following details my research as an undergraduate and Masters thesis student:

~ Determining the modes of oscillation of five Southern Pulsating Stars

~ Computational modelling pf the observed geometry of white dwarf accretion disks within eclipsing cataclysmic variable systems for different white dwarf and binary system parameters in order to simulate the light curves of different types of cataclysmic variables

~ Characterising the star EPIC 250088244 and determining its membership to the Upper Scorpius region

~ Determining the spin and orbital periods of two cataclysmic variables