I've been an assistant professor at the PTYS/LPL since fall of 2007. I moved from Ireland to the United States in 1998 to pursue graduate studies in planetary science at the California Institute of Technology. After five enjoyable years in Pasadena, I spent two years in both Boston (at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Flagstaff (at the U.S. Geological Survey) as a postdoc. My wife and I now live in Tucson with our three kids, two cats, one dog and assorted fish. Despite (or maybe because of) growing up on an island where billions of tons of water fall out of the sky each year, I like the desert and enjoy hiking and camping when possible.

During my stays in Flagstaff and Tucson, I have worked mostly with data from the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE). My research interests encompass surface processes on planetary bodies throughout the solar system. I am especially interested in those processes that affect, or are driven by, planetary ices. Current work includes modeling of landscape evolution of the martian polar caps, concentration of volatiles in the polar craters of the Moon and Mercury, fractal descriptions of topography as deduced from Titan's shorelines and seasonal volatile transport on large asteroids such as Ceres.