I am the director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, where I conduct research in SETI. I also have served a the Instrument Team Project Scientist for NEID, and done extensive research in exoplanetary and stellar astrophysics. I have a large research group working on a range of problems in astronomy.

You can read more about the PSETI Center here, and about the research it conducts here.

Interested students:

If you are interested in working in SETI at Penn State, I encourage you to apply to one of our degree programs. Most of the students I work with are graduate students in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, but I also work with students in other departments in the university, especially students who take ASTRO 576 and 476 (graduate and undergraduate courses in SETI).

Graduate students in related programs at Penn State can, via the astrobiology dual-title PhD program, take astronomy courses and the graduate SETI course as part of that program. I am also open to working with students in other departments. I do not have any influence over or particular knowledge of admissions to those programs.

Applicants to our program do not need to have the endorsement of a Penn State faculty member, and do not need to identify an opening in a research group to apply. Individual faculty in our department do not have any particular influence over admissions, and the department does not admit students to work with any particular adviser.

Most students in our program do not begin research full time until their second or third year (and over the summer of their first year). I cannot predict the amount of funding or availability for new students I will have more than a year or two out, but I am always looking for good students to work on novel projects.

Graduate admissions for Astronomy & Astrophysics are very competitive, with around 10-15% of applicants getting offers. Most or all successful applicants have an undergraduate degree in physics, very good grades, and some prior research experience. All students in our program are guaranteed full support (for instance, in the form of a tuition waiver and a teaching assistanceship for a living stipend) as long as they are in good academic standing. Undergraduate admissions are not done through departments, and we have no control over them, but any students at the University Park campus can take the SETI courses

To learn more about applying to graduate school at Penn State astronomy, see here and here.

Older research:

My research group was featured in the Eberly College of Science Journal here.

Some of my various research projects:

• I do a lot of with in SETI.
• MINERVA: A partnership between Harvard, Penn State, the University of Montana, and the University of New South Wales to find and characterize transiting and nearby rocky planets
• exoplanets.org: A powerful tool to explore the orbits of the known exoplanets.
• The Ĝ search for Kardashev civilizations.
• Tabby’s Star (Boyajian’s Star) (The WTF Star)
• RVLIN and BOOTTRAN, IDL packages of routines for fitting Keplerian orbital curves to the radial velocity data from stars hosting multiplanet systems, and for getting accurate uncertainties in their orbital parameters (including their transit times).
• The hitherto unheralded Galactic cluster Ruprecht 147
• The origins of stellar jitter
• Long period exoplanets and multiplanet systems orbiting nearby stars with the California Planet Survey consortium and the Hobby Eberly Telescope
• The strange exoplanet false positive MARVELS-1
• The Habitable Zone Planet Finding spectrograph (HPF) at the Hobby-Eberly Telescope
• The CHIRON planet search
• The planet-star activity connection
• Planets around hot subdwarfs
• I work with research associate Ming Zhao on precise infrared photometry of hot Jupiters
• The Lunar Farside Highlands Problem
• The old, nearby cluster Lodén 1 is neither old, nor nearby, nor a cluster.
• A Second Pleiades in the Sky
• Quantifying Habitability