Planetary scientist · NASA Postdoctoral Fellow, Johnson Space Center
I study how small bodies deliver material to Earth, finding meteorite falls in weather radar and tracing meteoroids back to the asteroids and comets they came from.
Across the Earth, every night, thousands of automated stargazers are waiting to take pictures of shooting stars. I am one of the scientists who study these meteors.
Meteorite collections aren't a fair sample of what hits Earth. What survives to the ground is decided by an object's history close to the Sun, not only where it came from.
I’m a planetary scientist in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) division at NASA Johnson Space Center. The sky above us is instrumented — and most of what falls out of it is never found. My work teaches machines to spot freshly fallen meteorites in the U.S. NEXRAD weather-radar network, so we can get to them before the weather does.
I specialise in the full chain from fireball → fall → meteorite, combining wide-field camera networks (DFN, FRIPON, the Global Fireball Observatory), small-body dynamics, and the physics of atmospheric entry. That chain keeps surprising us: meteorite collections turn out to be a strongly filtered sample of what actually hits Earth, shaped by thermal fragmentation near the Sun (Nature Astronomy, 2025), and most “comet-like” fireballs are in fact asteroidal interlopers.
I earned my PhD at Curtin University in 2022, chasing fireballs across the Australian outback with the Desert Fireball Network. Along the way, the IAU named asteroid (33964) Patrickshober — a rock I’m happy to report is staying safely in the main belt.
Scenes from the fireball networks and recovery campaigns behind the papers
Interactive: see a fall in weather radar
My asteroid