About me
I am currently a Brinson Prize Fellow in observational cosmology at the University of Chicago. Prior to this, I was a Schmidt AI in Science Fellow, and before that, a postdoctoral scholar working with Professor Jo Bovy, at the University of Toronto. I finished a PhD in Physics at UCLA in May, 2020. I grew up in Yorktown, Virginia.
Research
I am broadly interested in cosmic probes of dark matter physics. Most of my research is structured around devising new techniques to study dark matter substructure with the aim of addressing several kinds of questions in fundamental physics and cosmology: How does the formation mechanism of dark matter in the early Universe manifest in the properties of dark substructure? How can we detect signatures of dark matter interactions with the standard model, or itself, from astrophysical observations? What are the properties of the early Universe on very small scales, those which correspond to the masses of dwarf galaxies and invisible dark matter halos that exist today? To answer these questions I use a variety of tools, notably strong gravitational lensing and galactic dynamics.
My github hosts several open-source software packages for gravitational lens modeling and dynamics. pyHalo is a python package for simulating dark matter halos for gravitational lensing simulations. darkspirals is a python package for forward modeling phase-space spirals subject to perturbations by dark matter substructure.