I will be moving to the University of Texas, Austin as a McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in summer 2012!

I am a graduate student at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

I am interested in simulating the evolution of protoplanetary disks, the characterization of extrasolar planets and hydrodynamical and N-body codes. My academic advisor, Greg Laughlin, and I have collaborated on several such projects. I also maintain the Systemic Console, an application for discovering extrasolar planets, which is used both for outreach and to find and publish new planetary systems. Before coming to UC Santa Cruz, I was an undergraduate at the University of Bologna (Italy), where I worked on the dynamics of stellar systems.

I am also keenly interested in computer programming and scientific computing, particularly targeting the Mac OS X platform. I maintain a few open source projects and discuss my coding experiences in my computer programming blog.