About Me

I am a Research Scientist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute, a division of the Simons Foundation. I play a leadership role in the Exoplanets and Astronomical Data groups.

I am affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History as a Research Associate. Previously, I did my PhD at the University of Chicago.

Research

My research is broadly focused on the connections between stars and the planets they host. I am an expert in high-precision spectroscopy of Sun-like stars. I am motivated by the long-term goal of putting our Solar System in context with other star-planet systems to assess how common — or rare — worlds like ours might be.

You can find a full list of my publications in this NASA ADS library, or read on for a summary of some research themes and representative papers from each.

Hunting for Exoplanets with Radial Velocities

I am working towards the near-future discovery of Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars with the radial velocity (or Doppler) technique. I am a member of the Terra Hunting Experiment science team as well as the Keck Planet Finder science team. My interests in this space include target selection and survey planning as well as scientific data analysis (Gupta & Bedell 2023). In the past, I led a large survey of 80 "solar twin" stars with ESO's HARPS spectrograph and discovered several exoplanets around them (Bedell et al. 2015, Melendez, Bedell, et al. 2017, Gan, Bedell, et al. 2021).

Detailed Characterization of Stars

I also have research interests in the properties & compositions of stars like our Sun. I have produced elemental abundance measurements that reveal the chemical evolution of our Galaxy and possibly even signatures of past planetary cannibalism (Bedell et al. 2018, Spina et al. 2021)! More recently, I have worked with spectra from the ESA Gaia mission and from the SDSS projects to investigate stellar properties on a larger scale (Angelo et al. 2024, Behmard et al. 2023, Rampalli et al. 2024).

I'm also interested in the astrophysics of stellar variability, including mapping the surfaces of stars (Luger, Bedell, et al. 2021, Tran, Bedell et al. 2023).

Data Analysis Methods for Astronomical Spectroscopy

I develop innovative data analysis techniques to enable cutting-edge science. I work with data-driven approaches to address hard problems including telluric correction and wavelength calibration (Bedell et al. 2019, Zhao et al. 2021).

Other Professional Activities

I strongly support open science and love collaborating broadly. To this end, I produce open-source software (e.g. wobble, an implementation of my novel data-driven method for radial velocity measurements) and run interactive workshops and hack weeks (e.g. the Sun-as-a-Star Workshop and the Telluric Line Hack Week).

I create and maintain databases to support community science, including the gaia-kepler.fun crossmatch and the gr8stars spectroscopic archive.