Hi! I'm Haleigh and I build island worlds like this one to see if they could host an origin of life.
PhD Candidate · Computational Astrobiology · Purdue
Hi! I'm Haleigh and I build island worlds like this one to see if they could host an origin of life.
NSF Graduate Research Fellow working with Dr. Stephanie Olson. I run ExoPlaSim simulations across obliquity, rotation rate, and stellar type to track wet-dry cycling in warm little ponds (conditions thought to let RNA precursors accumulate).
About
Liquid water is the usual test for habitability. It tells you a planet could keep life alive, not that life could ever have started there. That second question is what my doctoral work is for: which planetary conditions actually favor an origin of life, and how to inform target prioritization for direct-imaging missions like NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory.
In Dr. Stephanie Olson's PHAB Lab at Purdue, I use ExoPlaSim and a custom post-processing pipeline to simulate volcanic island worlds across obliquity, rotation rate, and stellar host, tracking the wet-dry cycling and prebiotic-organic accumulation that this route to an origin of life depends on. The deliverable is an Origin of Life Index, ranking exoplanet targets by their potential for wet-dry cycling, one of the leading proposed routes to an origin of life, rather than by whether they could merely sustain it.
- NSF Graduate Research Fellow
- Zonta Amelia Earhart Fellow
- Ross Fellowship
- Summa Cum Laude
- NASA Space Grant (INSGC)
- AGU Invited Speaker (2025)
- Session Co-convener, Goldschmidt 2025 and 2026
As an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, I have served as Executive Secretary on NASA review panels for Habitable Worlds and the Exoplanets Research Program, I peer-review for the Planetary Science Journal, and I coach incoming GRFP applicants through Purdue's OGSPS fellowships office after winning my own.
Selected Projects
Research
Computational Astrobiology · ExoPlaSim
Habitability asks whether a planet could keep life alive. I ask the prior question: could life have started there in the first place? I run ExoPlaSim (a 3D general circulation model) across a parameter space of obliquity, rotation rate, star type, and surface configuration to figure out which planets allow wet-dry cycling in warm little ponds. The pond model then tracks whether precipitation, evaporation, and haze deposition let RNA precursors actually accumulate.
Chapter 1 (in prep for PNAS): where a planet cycles wet and dry follows where its star puts the light — and high obliquity opens that cycling up across the whole globe. Whether the organics survive is a separate fight: haze has to deliver them, and the ponds have to hold them through the wet phase.
The island you see here is what I simulate (a volcanic hotspot where sea-land breeze circulation drives evaporation and precipitation through warm little ponds).
Full CV (PDF) · Google Scholar · ORCID · Olson Lab →
Supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-2444108.
Resume / CV
PDF preview available on larger screens.
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Happy to talk about exoplanet climates, prebiotic chemistry, or GCM development.
