Research

Exocomets are the analogous term for comets in our Solar System, icy bodies residing in the Kuiper belt analogues (debris discs) of exoplanetary systems that perturb into the inner regions of the system by dynamical interaction with exoplanets. In recent years, there have been a number of stars that have shown evidence of exocometary activity due to the unique shape of their transits in lightcurves. The most convincing proof of this is the young system Beta Pictoris (Zieba et al. 2019). Similar systems such as KIC 3542116 and KIC 11084727 (Rappaport et al. 2018) have also detected cometary activity in their lightcurves. The significance of exocomets allows us to further understand the morphology of extrasolar systems, and their dynamical interactions with bodies for us to be able to detect them.

An automated method to detect comet-like transits was developed in Kennedy et al. 2019, which used Kepler data in the main analysis. As TESS provides more data about younger stars with various astrophysical variability, my first project was to extend the search for exocomets towards the TESS dataset that includes stars that are 30-100 times brighter than Kepler, and over an all-sky survey, reducing the bias of star sample.

I am currently working on searching for exocomets in photometry with machine learning (Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)).

My other research interests include the search for faint binary systems with spectroscopic data. This research comes from my MSc thesis on using PolyChord nested sampling towards the development of the Gaia DR4 pipeline with Dr George Seabroke and Dr Pablo Lemos.

Other Work

I have a keen interest in Earth Observation (EO). Before my PhD, I was an EO Data Scientist with the University of Leicester and Sylvera where I used machine learning to quantify aboveground biomass to monitor the performance of carbon offsets. The wider perspective is to build confidence and transparency in the carbon market as we work towards Net Zero. I also held a part-time position in a start-up company specialising in cost-effective satellites to explore their next avenue of satellites in EO.

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