research
Everything we know about star formation in other galaxies is based on light from massive stars. Yet, in our own Galaxy, it's the formation of massive stars that is the least understood. In the Milky Way, we have learned much about star formation by observing the gas and dust in local, predominantly low-mass star formation regions, but this only accounts for part of the picture. Molecular gas, the essential ingredient for star formation, is concentrated in the Galactic Molecular Ring, though it is only recently, with the advent of high-resolution observing techniques, that this region of our Galaxy has been studied in detail.
My research has been devoted to obtaining high-resolution observations of infrared-dark clouds (IRDCs), which are the known birth sites of massive stars and star clusters. I have probed the structure of IRDCs in the mid-infrared and studied the mass distribution, and found that the mass in these regions is still predominantly found in the most massive structures, indicating that they are in an early evolutionary stage and will likely fragment further before star formation proceeds. With follow-up molecular line observations of the IRDC sample (in prep.), I will provide structural, chemical, and kinematic profiles of IRDCs at arcsecond-scale resolution for the first time.