A Brief History of Research Projects

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”

― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

These days, I can usually be found around the McGill campus or a nearby cafe staring at a blackboard, debugging code, and drinking coffee. For the prior three years my activities looked much the same, with my average position vector pointing to the third floor of the Perimeter Institute. Before moving to Canada, I got my Ph.D. in physics from Yale University where I wrote my dissertation on HPC simulations and signatures of ultralight (or fuzzy) dark matter as a Future Investigator in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST). I was also a Fellow of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale, which supported my work on developing Python code for mapping ancient Egyptian star writings to observational astronomical data, seeding my current archaeoastronomical work.

To get a sense of the research questions that drive me and the code that enables them, scroll over the flip cards below!

Dark Matter Haloes

Code: chplUltra (Chapel)

Testing ultralight dark matter by comparing simulation results with observational data.

Egyptian Constellations

Code: decanO.py (astropy)

Mapping Ancient Egyptian constellations to explore stellar timekeeping practices.

Primordial Black Holes

Code: Mathematica

Calculated gravitational wave signatures of primorial black hole mergers in the early universe.

Galaxy Bias

Code: C/C++

Made mock data to test bispectrum and power spectrum analysis code being developed for DESI.

Inflation & Dark Matter

Code: Wim.Py (Python)

Calculated WIMPzilla dark matter production through inflaton-field coupling for sigmoid inflation models.

Quasars

Code: Pascal, IRAF, Image J

Observed quasar 3C 454.3 during its historic flare in summer 2014 at Foggy Bottom Observatory.