Research

I work on forward modeling and retrieval questions for exoplanet atmospheres, including whether different combinations of C/O ratio and metallicity can be distinguished with JWST-quality transit spectra.

The project uses ARCiS together with PandExo to generate atmospheric models and synthetic observations, with particular attention to molecular features such as CO₂ and H₂O and to the observing conditions under which atmospheric scenarios remain distinguishable.

This completed project focused on modeling a sample of 15 strong gravitational lenses to study how the internal mass structure of massive elliptical galaxies relates to their environment. I worked with lenstronomy and Bayesian lens-modeling workflows to constrain the mass and light distributions of the deflector galaxies and compare their structural properties with measures of local galaxy density.

The project culminated in my first-author / co-first-author research publication, “Investigating the relation between the environment and internal structure of massive elliptical galaxies using strong lensing”, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, 699, A259 (2025). The work found that the centroid offset between mass and light is not correlated with local galaxy density, supporting its use as a probe of dark-matter physics with limited environmental contamination.

At Leiden University, I investigated high-resolution transmission spectroscopy of the hot Jupiter WASP-76b using CARMENES data, focusing on the search for atmospheric signatures including TiO, VO, and H₂O.

The work introduced me to high-resolution spectroscopy, model templates, cross-correlation techniques, and the challenges of comparing atmospheric detections across spectral resolutions.