I grew up near Bothell, WA, graduated from Brookline High School in 1995 and the Boston University Astronomy Department in 1999, where my thesis adviser was Prof. Dan Clemens.
I finished my PhD in 2006 with Prof. Geoff Marcy at UC Berkeley. My thesis included studies of stellar activity levels, their impact on radial velocity measurements, analyses of weak and long-period signals of exoplanets, and the Catalog of Nearby Exoplanets.
I was a research associate at Cornell University, working with Prof. James Lloyd and his group on the TripleSpec Exoplanet Discovery Instrument.
In 2006 I married Julia Miller Kregenow, who finished her PhD in astrophysics at Berkeley in May 2007. We live in College Township with our children, Georgia and August.
I joined the faculty at Penn State University Departement of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the Eberly College of Science at University Park in Fall, 2009. I am a member of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds and the Penn State Astrobiology Research Center, part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
“Meta-astronomy” just means the stuff that isn’t strictly astronomy research but is necessary for, or relevant to, its practice; the who, what, why, where, when, and how of astronomy.