Collaborators: Rob Gutermuth (UMass), Judy Pipher (U. of Rochester),  Lori Allen (NOAO), Phil Myers (CfA), Scott Wolk (CfA), Ignazio Pillitteri (CfA/Palermo). 

Current Ph.D. students: Tom Allen,  Past Ph.D. students: Elaine Winston, Erin Kryukova

With the Spitzer Space telescope, my collaborators and I have surveyed the molecular clouds and star forming regions within the nearest 1 kpc of the Sun.  This includes the Orion molecular clouds, the Cepheus OB3 cloud and the Mon R2 cloud.  Combining these data with that from the c2d Survey, we have found a power-law relationship between the surface density of stars and the surface density of gas (see figure below) - implying that the star formation rate per area scales with the 2nd to 3rd power of the gas column density, and we have found protostars in more crowded regions tend to be more luminous.  We complemented these surveys with Chandra and XMM X-ray obsevations. The papers can be found here.

Gutermuth et al. 2011)