The physics of impacts.
The evolution of worlds.

Sound beyond
human hearing.

Low-frequency acoustic waves can travel far beyond the events that create them. I use infrasound to detect and characterize natural and human-generated sources, from meteors and spacecraft reentries to explosive events.

My work combines ground-based instruments, airborne acoustic sensors, field experiments, and propagation modeling. These observations help identify where a signal originated, how it traveled through the atmosphere, and what it reveals about its source.

Understanding
atmospheric entry.

Meteoroids entering Earth’s atmosphere can produce bright fireballs and powerful shock waves. Their acoustic signatures carry information about fragmentation, energy release, and the altitude of the source.

Research on events such as the 2008 Tajikistan bolide explores how infrasound can contribute to global monitoring of extraterrestrial impacts and planetary defense.

Modeling the formation
of impact craters.

I use iSALE shock physics simulations to investigate crater formation, the response of planetary materials to high-speed impacts, and the evolution of rocky and icy surfaces.

My work includes the transition from simple to complex lunar craters, the relationship between crater morphology and Europa’s ice shell structure, and the influence of ice sheet thickness on the formation of a Hiawatha-like impact crater. These studies connect the physics of a collision with the surface features it leaves behind.

Artificial meteors.
Natural laboratories.

Sample return capsules provide opportunities to study high-speed atmospheric entry using objects with known properties. Their acoustic and seismic signatures help test the models used to interpret natural meteors.

I served as Principal Scientist for seismoacoustic observations of the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule reentry in 2023. My research connects coordinated field observations with studies of shock propagation, source location, and changes in acoustic signals along the reentry trajectory.

Meteor infrasound,
from theory to observation.

My PhD research examined infrasound from large bolides detected over global distances and centimeter-sized meteoroids observed at regional distances.

I combined optical observations and infrasound measurements to investigate shock production and test the ReVelle weak shock model. This work explored how recorded signals constrain source heights, energy deposition, and the influx of large meteoroids to Earth.