From an astrophysics viewpoint, I am interested in the formation and evolution of low-mass stellar systems because they define the intriguing boundary between our current notions of star clusters and dwarf galaxies. This is the small-scale frontier of galaxy formation and a central challenge for near-field cosmology in the era of Gaia, Hubble, LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA, and JWST — with wide-ranging implications for fundamental physics. My activities aim to address three key open questions: How did the first stellar aggregates form in the early universe? Is there a missing link between stellar and super-massive black holes? Where is the limit for the presence of dark matter on small astrophysical scales?

From an applied mathematics viewpoint, I am interested in several topics broadly connected to the classical gravitational N-body problem, especially Vlasov-Poisson equilibria and related perturbation and asymptotic methods for elliptic PDEs, kinetic theory for application to self-gravitating systems and plasmas, kinetic counterparts of the theory of rotating fluids, and integrability and numerical methods for Hamiltonian systems. I also have a growing interest in developing techniques from Bayesian statistics for application to astrophysical data.