Handala, the barefoot boy who turned his back on the world until Palestine is free, was created in 1969 by the late Palestinian political cartoonist Naji al-Ali. Forever stuck at the age of ten, the age that Naji was when he was exiled from Palestine, Handala refuses to grow up until he can return home. Handala has been consistently rendered on protest signs and art in support of the Palestinian people in the midst of the genocide unfolding in Gaza.

know your rights | conozca sus derechos

Radial Velocity Follow-Up of Li-Rich Giants with ESPRESSO

Jan. - Sept. 2025

One red giant with all of its observations' stacked spectrum.

Stellar evolution models show that most of the lithium in red giants, taken with the Very Large Telescope in Chile, is destroyed when a star goes through the first dredge up phase after the main sequence. However, ~1% of red giants are lithium-rich. The leading theories to explain lithium-enrichment in red giants is mass transfer from an asymptotic giant branch star, or tidal interactions with a binary star. This project aims to test the binarity of red giants, by using spectra to measure radial velocities and chemical abundances of these objects.

Advisors: Maryum Sayeed, PhD Astronomy Candidate (PI: Dr. Melissa Ness)

Paper: Looking for Companionship: Radial Velocity Follow-Up of Lithium-Rich Giants with ESPRESSO (Sayeed et al., inc MMG 2025)

Connecting binary formation, dissipative precession, and planetary dynamics to understand the present-day orbital configuration distribution

May - July 2025

The massive hot Jupiter candidate CoRoT-2b orbits its primary G7-type dwarf star CoRoT-2 in a prograde direction relative to the stellar rotation with a wide stellar binary companion.

About half of all stars in the galaxy have a binary companion, making it crucial to understand how this additional mass influences planetary systems. Observations of exoplanets in stellar binaries (s-type) have revealed a surprising preference for orbit-orbit-aligned configurations, where the orbits of the planets and the stellar binary lie in the same plane. Additionally, the stellar obliquity—the angle between the host star's spin axis and the planet's orbital plane—has become a significant focus in recent years. One of Malena Rice’s recent works (Rice et al. 2024) compiled the joint obliquity-binary inclination distribution, uncovering a complex picture with notable trends, such as an overabundance of joint orbit-orbit and spin-orbit aligned systems, alongside systems with significant spin-orbit misalignment. This project aims to theoretically explain these trends by connecting three key processes: the primordial orientations after star formation, dynamical evolution during the protoplanetary disk phase (dissipative precession), and post-disk dynamical effects such as planet-planet scattering and Kozai mechanisms. Using realistic birth configurations from star formation theory, the project will employ an evolution code (Gerbig et al. 2024) to model disk dynamics and use the outcomes as initial conditions for Rebound simulations of planetary dynamics. The goal is to understand the role of these processes in shaping final orientation distributions, with a focus on N-body simulations and Rebound, a tool widely used in astrophysical studies.

Advisors: Dr. Konstantin Gerbig and Dr. Malena Rice, PI

Detection and Validation of Transiting Exoplanets Around Nearby M-dwarf Stars

May - Aug. 2024

We compared our TLS results of orbital periods and planet radius using both the published data and our measured data.

In the Milky Way galaxy, cool and dim M-dwarfs constitute the majority of the stellar population. However, their intrinsic faintness has posed challenges for many telescopes in obtaining high precision photometry. Throughout the 2010s, NASA's Kepler mission primarily targeted Sun-like stars, leading to the discovery of thousands of exoplanets—planets orbiting stars beyond our solar system. In contrast, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is specifically designed to study redder stars, such as M-dwarfs, which are more likely to host smaller, rocky planets similar to Earth. This project focuses on identifying transiting planets around M-dwarfs, characterized by periodic decreases in brightness due to planetary eclipses of stars in our field of view. We have developed a custom algorithm in Python to process TESS images, extract and clean photometry, detect orbital periods of transiting planets, and validate the authenticity of these planet candidates. We tested our transit detection and vetting algorithm on 49 confirmed transiting planets with published planet masses, along with 126 planet candidates from the TESS mission, known as TESS Objects of Interest (TOI). The recovery rates were approximately 61.91% for TOIs and 62% for the confirmed nearby M-dwarfs planets. Through the research project, we aimed to establish a methodology that yields a high number of validated transiting exoplanets, potentially uncovering previously undetected planets missed by the TESS mission.

Advisor: Dr. Dax Feliz (PI: Dr. Ruth Angus)

The Effect of OB-type Stars on the Star Formation Rate in Star Clusters

May - Aug. 2023

A cloud with different initial mass (M4: m = 104 M_⊙; M5: m = 105 M_⊙; M6: m = 106 M_⊙ in free fall (M6: t_ff = 0.67 Myr; M5: t_ff = 2.1 Myr; M4: t_ff = 6.7 Myr) for gas to collapse from only gravity. The average fraction of massive stars is constant, but the mass of each individual star is randomly selected. At specific times, the total star formation rate (SFR) is slightly reduced after the formation of massive stars. The figure shows the evolution of the SFRs for all stars (red dashed line) and O-type stars (blue line).

Most stars form in star clusters, which are populations of gravitationally bound stars that have similar ages and elemental abundances. This similarity indicates that they formed in the same molecular cloud, and since they also have similar ages, star clusters must form quickly. The consensus on why they form rapidly is that the feedback from massive stars (> 8 solar masses), such as O-type stars, stops the cluster formation due to their high ionizing luminosity, strong stellar winds, and short lifetimes before supernova explosions. The accumulated feedback eventually stops the cluster formation on timescales of 1-10 million years. Our hypothesis is that if the O-type stars with feedback form early, then the cluster will evolve differently. The prediction is that fewer stars will form after the birth of the first O-type star. We examine this hypothesis by analyzing theoretical models of the star cluster formation process simulated with the computer program Torch. Torch is a collection of numerical codes that communicate through the AMUSE framework to model different physical processes for star cluster formation: FLASH for the hydrodynamics of the gas; PETAR for collisional dynamics of stars; SeBa for the evolution of stars. We plot the total star formation rate and that for O-type stars as a function of time, providing insight into the rate at which stars form within different simulated clusters. In the models explored, feedback from the first O-type stars is found to produce a drop in the star formation rate, thereby confirming the hypothesis.

Advisors: Dr. Eric Andersson and Dr. Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, PI

mars viewed from tucson, az. credit: me and a friend

you'll find a few highlights here and vlog section from my undergraduate work. click here to view my full CV!

research presentations

software packages

AstroInk: a public web application for astrophysical literature search and summarization, integrating arXiv API querying, fast summarization, and citation generation using Streamlit and deployed on Streamlit Cloud.

course projects

Paper: Integrating a Fiber Optic Cable into a 3D-Printed Spectrograph

Paper: TIC 46432937 b: A Gas Giant Planet Transiting an M-Dwarf Star

teaching & outreach

undergraduate course grader, dept. of astronomy & astrophysics, columbia University

• Fall 2024: Stars and Atoms (ASTR-UN1836)
• Spring 2026:

outreach, dept. of astronomy & astrophysics, columbia University

• Spring, Fall 2025

skilllz

you can mainly email me or find me on github, linkedin, and orcid.

email: mjm2418 [at] barnard [dot] edu