Researcher Summary
I pursue research in the field of Galactic Archaeology, which seeks to unravel the formation and evolution history of the Milky Way. I do this using a variety of astronomical data including spectra, photometry and asteroseismology.
Key projects in which I am involved that further this investigation are:
* Statistical analysis of chemical abundance distributions in stellar populations using techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Bayesian Inference and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE).
* Galactic Chemical Evolution studies with chemical yields compared to big observational datasets
* Automated determination of stellar parameters and chemical abundances
* Characterisation of binary systems
* Detailed stellar parameter and chemical abundance analysis of benchmark stars
I'm an active member of 4MOST and WEAVE, which are large scale multi-object spectrographs on the 4m telescopes, VISTA@ESO in the southern hemisphere and WHT@ING in the northern hemisphere respectively. With the high and medium resolution spectra from both projects will characterising to never before detail the chemical distribution within the Milky Way.
A critical mission that has significantly advanced our understanding of the Milky Way is the ESA Gaia mission which is measuring precise positions and motions of over 1 billion stars in the Milky Way.
Combining the kinematic with chemical information from these projects will result in a chemico-kinematic, multi-dimensional chart of the Milky Way against which to test our theories of galactic formation and evolution.
