Dr. Monty works in the fields of Galactic Archaeology, Near-Field Cosmology and astronomical instrumentation. Her research focuses on using the oldest stars in galaxies to trace how galaxies form and evolve. Her favourite science objects are ancient (globular) star clusters because their ages, orbits and chemical compositions can all be determined to high precision. Her main research focus has been to reconstruct the (accretion) history of the Milky Way using its population of globular clusters, augmented by studies of chemically peculiar ancient stars in the stellar halo. To do this, she combines data from high resolution spectrographs to measure 20+ different chemical elements, with precision ground- and space-based astrometric and photometric data to recover the motions and ages of stars. Using galactic chemical evolution models and dynamical modeling tools, she combines this information in an effort to reconstruct the history of galaxies. She has also worked to characterise optical fibre performance for next-generation instrumentation and developed realistic end-to-end scientific simulation tools for upcoming adaptive optics instruments. Dr. Monty is a founding member of the ChemZz collaboration working to place the Milky Way in context with galaxies across redshift and a member of SDSS, the 4MOST consortium and the MAVIS instrument consortium.

She will be sharing her first year at NMSU with Northwestern University through a joint appointment as a CIERA independent research fellow.