Research
I'm interested in characterizing brown dwarfs and giant exoplanets to understand both their formation and evolution histories and the physical processes occuring in their atmospheres that drive our observations. I primarily use atmospheric retrievals (CHIMERA, Line et al. 2014) and forward modeling (Sonora family of models, PICASO, and VIRGA) to characterize their composition, cloud properties, mass, radius, and dynamics.
I've done retrievals or forward modelling of both brown dwarfs and direclty imaged exoplanets. These objects span a wide range of temperatures (T = 270 K to T = 2400 K) and have spectra that cover different wavelengths and resolutions (1-2.5 microns at R~100 to 3-5 microns at R~2700). Click on the projects to learn more.
We detected deuterium (in the form of deuterated methane) in an extrasolar atmosphere for the first time. We also detected phosphine at the one part-per-billion level. We quantify the effective mixing timescale for PH3 and calculate the D/H ratio for WISE 0855, the coldest brown dwarf.
In a submitted Nature paper by Hoch, Rowland, and 28 others, we detected a silicate absorption feature in the extremely young, direclty imaged planet YSES-1 c.
We performed a suite of retrievals on self-consistent Sonora Bobcat spectra to show how different pressure-temperature profile parameterizations and uniform-with-pressure chemical abundance profiles can bias retrieved parameters. We developed a non-uniform abundance profile parameterization and identify specific gases and effective temperatures where such a parameterization may be needed.
In Faherty et al. (including Rowland) 2024 (published in Nature), we detected methane in emission in an isolated, cold brown dwarf, which we believe is an auroral signature.