My research lies at the intersection of exoplanet demographics, binary star dynamics, and galactic archaeology. I study exoplanetary systems and their architectures, investigating how planetary demographics vary within the Galactic context. This work builds on my Ph.D. research, where I focused on the structural and evolutionary relationships of planetary systems.

I am also deeply engaged in studying the dynamics of binary and multi-stellar systems, exploring how their configurations affect both star and planet formation. As a member of Gaia DPAC’s CU6 team, I contribute to the analysis of radial velocities, which is essential for understanding binary star kinematics and the detection of hidden stellar companions.

My work also incorporates galactic archaeology, where I analyse halo stars to uncover the evolutionary history of the Milky Way.

Further expanding my research, I search for dormant compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes within binary systems, as these elusive objects reveal critical insights into stellar evolution and end states.

You can check out the complete list of my publications in this link.

And here is a summary of my recent works:

Planet Occurrence Rates in the Galactic Context

In the Galactic context, it is currently not fully understood how the structure and evolution of our Galaxy may affect the possibility of forming and maintaining planets, yet it is clear that our Galaxy is full of planets. As part of my Ph.D. thesis, I have worked on estimating planet occurrence rates in the Galactic context. I used both RV and transit search programs and performed injection and recovery tests to constrain the detectability of planets around each star. We’ve developed a simplified Bayesian method to constrain better the average number of planets per star and the fraction of stars with planets. Our results suggested that metal-poor stars and more massive stars host fewer low-mass close-in planets. Furthermore, we found the occurrence rates of these planets in the thin and thick disks to be comparable.

This work provides a first estimate of the close-in small planet occurrence rates in the solar neighborhood of the thin and thick disks of the Galaxy.

You can read more about this, here.

The Similarity of Planetary System Architectures

The planetary systems detected so far exhibit a wide diversity of architectures, and various methods have been proposed to study this diversity quantitatively. Straightforward ways to quantify the difference between two systems, and more generally two sets of multi-planetary systems, are helpful for studying this diversity. In this work, we have presented a novel approach, using a weighted extension of the energy distance (WED) metric to quantify the difference between planetary systems on the logarithmic period-radius plane. First, we demonstrated the use of this metric and its relation to previously introduced descriptive measures to characterize the arrangements of Kepler planetary systems. Then, by applying exploratory machine-learning tools, we attempted to find whether some order can be ascribed to the multi-planet Kepler system architectures. Next, we extend the WED to define the inter-catalog energy distance (ICED) - a distance metric between sets of multi-planetary systems. We have made the specific implementation presented in the paper available to the community through a public repository. We suggest using these metrics as complementary tools to compare different architectures of planetary systems and, in general, different catalogs of planetary systems.

You can read more about this, here.

The Planetary Mass-Radius Relation

We explored the nature of two regimes in the planetary mass-radius (M-R) relation. We suggested that the location of the breakpoint is linked to the onset of electron degeneracy in hydrogen and, therefore, to the planetary bulk composition. Specifically, it is the characteristic minimal mass of a planet that consists of mostly hydrogen and helium, and therefore its M-R relation is determined by the equation of state of these materials. We compare the M-R relation from observational data with the relation derived by population synthesis calculations and show a good qualitative agreement between the two samples.

You can read more about this, here.