Hello, welcome to my page, why don't you take a seat? Get comfortable, relax, take a second if you need to.
Grew up in Vancouver, Washington. Lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico for undergrad and moved to
New Brunswick, New Jersey for graduate school. I spend a lot of my time thinking about
physics, but I also like to build things and explore the wide world of the open source
community.
You can reach me at [email protected], or on mastodon at [email protected]. You
can find my CV
here:
I use astronomy to probe the properties of dark matter - a material we know
next to nothing about - yet we know that it pulled galaxies together and built the universe as
we
see it.
My Ph.D. adviser is Dr. Matthew Buckley.
We work with stellar kinematic data from the Gaia space observatory to build the most accurate
model of our local region of the galaxy. Recently, we have been interested in developing novel
machine learning techniques to learn the phase space distribution of stars in a completely
data-driven way. This assumption-free model of the phase space distribution can be used to solve
many problems in galactic dynamics in a new light, such as new accurate measurements of the
local
dark matter density.
A timeline of where I've been and what I do
I became Co-President in Fall 2023, and will serve until May 2024. I organize Student Seminars in Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers (SSPAR) seminars, barbeques, and any other events that serve our graduate student community.
I'm interested in how things are made. How much time and how many resources does it take to design and make a thing? I bought an ender 3 v2 3d printer near the end of lockdown so I could do something besides homework and research, and I've been working on a few different projects since then. On the left I've pictured one of the few projects I've actually finished: a BB-8 styled astromech that I designed completely from scratch. His name is NU-7 (or nut, given the pistachio green color).
I am a proud member and organizer for the Rutgers AAUP-AFT. I served as a picket captain for our Spring 2023 strike, where we fought back against Rutgers central administration and withheld our labor to negotiate a fair contract. I now serve as a union representative for the department of Physics and Astronomy to continue to organize for our upcoming 2026 contract negotiations.
I joined the Rutgers Physics & Astronomy department in 2020, and finished my Ph.D. qualifier exams in Fall 2021. I teach introductory and higher level undergraduate physics courses, and am working with Dr. Matthew Buckley to further our understanding of dark matter.
I worked with Dr. Pauline Comini from the GBAR collaboration to study antimatter in gravitational fields. I developed a PyVISA wrapper for interfacing with a Quantel CFR400 pulsed Nd:YAG laser, and instrumentation for related systems.
Credit to Kiyoko Simmons from the UNM Honors College for helping me get this application together. I was not the most qualified applicant for something like this (few people usually are) but being awarded this honor was a massive boon to my confidence as a researcher.
I spent the summer of 2018 in West Lafayette, Indiana working with Dr. Daniel Elliott, Amy Damitz, and George Toh on a precision measurement of one of the 6s → 7p transition matrix elements for cesium.
While I served in SPS leadership roles, I helped secure funding to get students to conferences, connected students with research opportunities, and made a great T-shirt with my partner. I also started the discord server, freeing us from GroupMe forever.
I was an active member of the P&A department community. I was involved in numerous undergraduate research projects, held multiple leadership roles in our SPS chapter, and I even got a photo-op at the ground-breaking ceremony for our new PAÍS facilty. I grew closely attached to New Mexico during my time here 💗.