David Principe

David Principe is a research scientist working as part of the Chandra X-ray Observatory High Energy Transmission Grating (HETG) group. Prior to  MIT, he received his Ph.D. from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2014 where his dissertation involved multiwavelength observations of young stars and their circumstellar disks. In 2016, David was awarded a FONDECYT postdoctoral research fellowship in Santiago, Chile where he worked with radio, infrared and optical observations of outbursting protostars and nearby star-disk systems at the Universidad Diego Portales. As an astronomer at MIT, he’s currently interested in understanding the role X-ray emission plays in the formation of stars and planets and using big telescopes to spatially-resolve circumstellar disk features (e.g., warps, planet-induced spirals, fragmentation) in an effort to learn how stars gain mass at this critical stage of their evolution. In his spare time David likes to hike, pet any animal he can find, and try to make plant-based food taste good.