About Me

Hello! I am a 5th year PhD candidate at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, where I work with Prof. Erin Kara to study how supermassive black holes grow and affect their surroundings. I graduated from Case Western Reserve University in 2019 with undergraduate degrees in physics and astronomy, and, prior to coming to MIT, obtained my masters degree in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge, where I worked with Prof. Chris Reynolds.

I work primarily on supermassive black hole transients, like Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) and changing-look AGN, from a multi-wavelength perspective. I’m particularly excited about these events because they allow us to study extreme accretion phenomena, like the formation of accretion disks, relativistic jets, and the X-ray corona, and learn about supermassive black holes that are usually dormant and hard to study! I’m an observer at heart and work with a variety of observatories to study the evolution of these objects during their outbursts. I started graduate school primarily working at X-ray wavelengths, working with data from telescopes like NICER, XMM-Newton, NuSTAR, Swift, and Chandra. I’ve slowly been incorporating longer and longer wavelengths into my toolbox, making my way all the way down to 28 microns with JWST to study the dust in the nuclear environment around these supermassive black holes. I also have broad interests in high-energy astrophysics and have also worked on high resolution X-ray spectroscopy of nearby AGN and the evolution of AGN feedback in high-redshift galaxy clusters. Check out more of my research interests here.

Outside of research, I’m passionate about science outreach and advocacy work. On the outreach side, I write for Astrobites, a collaboration of graduate students that takes scientific articles and condenses them down into bite-size pieces that the public can understand, and I help run both Boston’s Astronomy on Tap events and the MIT Astrogazers organization. On the advocacy side, I am deeply involved in various advocacy efforts in the MIT Physics Department, including our Grads Advising Graduate Admissions initiative (GAGA), which I am co-leading in 2024-2025. GAGA is committed to making the admissions process more equitable, and one of our main efforts is to provide application assistance through the MIT Physics Graduate Application Assistance Program (PhysGAAP). Check out more of my outreach and advocacy efforts here. In my free time, you’ll find me escaping into nature for hiking and camping adventures, reading, or watching a women’s soccer game.

Want to get in touch? Email me at mmasters@mit.edu!