Education
- PhD: Uppsala University, Sweden, 2009
- BS: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2003
My current research focuses around high-end computer simulations of planet formation. I am interested in the origin of the Earth, the Solar System, and exoplanets. A long-term goal of this research is to establish a model that combines all the necessary physics to simulate the formation of planetary systems, and enable comparisons with observations of exoplanets and circumstellar disks, as well as solar system constrains.
My first author papers have explored: planetesimal formation via disk vortices and streaming instability, the origin of disk vortices via dynamical instabilities, their properties and evolution; planet migration in evolutionary models; and modeling of transition disk observations.
Other interesting planetary objects have occasionally led me to works that fall outside the realm of your garden variety primordial gas-rich circumstellar disk, including debris disks, Kozai-Lidov dynamics, ice shell convection, and shallow water atmospheric models. I have also been working on black hole mergers in AGN disks: as it turns out, it’s a scaled-up version of core accretion scenario for planet formation.
A long, long time ago (I can still remember) I worked on observations.
Welcome to the NMSU Astronomy Department!