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, you can usually find me on the third floor of the Perimeter Institute talking science, staring at a blackboard, debugging code, and drinking coffee. 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 mapping ancient Egyptian star writings to observational astronomical data, a project I have taken with me to my postdoc.

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.