Welcome!  I'm a graduate physics student pursuing my Ph.D. at the University of Maryland.  My research is conducted under the advisement of Dr. Marc Kuchner at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.  I am currently involved in two projects:

Disks Around Herbig Ae/Be Stars
I am modeling these young disks as part of the Shared Risk Science Team for the Keck Nuller Interferometer (Wes Traub & Marc Kuchner, advisors).  I am currently modeling flat, non-flared, and flared disks using the two-component model of Chiang & Goldreich (1997).  From these models I calculate the integrated flux as a function of frequency to fit the spectral energy distribution and the surface brightness, visibility, and nuller response to investigate the inner structure.

Collisionless Debris Disk Dynamics
I am also in the process of investigating the signatures of Earth-like planets in collisionless debris disks.  Debris disk particles lose angular momentum due to Poynting-Robertson (PR) drag and spiral inwards towards their host star.  Along the way, they may get caught in mean-motion resonances (MMRs) with the planet and librate about these MMRs until they are eventually ejected due to close encounters with the planet.  Our model assumes non-interacting particles that evolve due to gravitational interactions with the star and planets, solar wind drag, radiation pressure, and PR drag.

I have developed a hybrid symplectic integrator for our models and implemented it on the 420-processor Thunderhead cluster at NASA GSFC.  This allows us to routinely perform simulations of ~5,000 particles and will enable us to perform several simulations of ~100,000 particles, which is approximately two orders of magnitude more particles than other models have considered.

I have created a catalog of debris disk ring structures due to terrestrial-mass planets. A few examples of my simulations are shown below.

dustmap.pro
All of the above images were synthesized using dustmap.pro, an IDL package I wrote to view exozodiacal clouds from any vantage point--even within the cloud.  dustmap.pro produces 2D or 3D density histograms and can synthesize images of dust clouds illuminated by starlight including both scattered light and thermal emission.  It uses scattering and absorption coefficients from Mie theory for astronomical silicate dust and a modified Hong phase function.  You can use it, too--all you need is a set of discrete 3D positions for input.  Download dustmap.pro here. 

To install it, access the directory that you saved it in and type

tar xvzf dustmap.1.0.tgz

Then check out the README.txt file.  Please let me know if you run across any bugs in this inaugural release.

dustmap also works in conjunction with ZODIPIC, which you can find on Marc Kuchner's home page.