About Me

I'm a Ph.D. candidate in the Astronomy Department at University of Maryland - College Park. Broadly, my research seeks to answer questions about why our Universe resembles the background video above, with a particular interest in dark matter and dark energy!

I currently work with Prof. Benedikt Diemer researching a better framework to study dark matter in universe-scale simulations. I also help build maps of the universe and investigate the many mechanisms that generate the diverse population of galaxies that we see in the sky today.

I include some personal interests and service work outside of research on my About Me page. The Research section below includes approachable summaries of the research I do, intended for audiences unfamiliar with astronomy. Publications contains a list of my papers, ordered from latest to earliest, and contains various links to find them and supplementary materials for those papers. Note that a few sections of various pages are still under construction!

Research

Mapping the Universe

The mysterious force that drives the accelerating expansion of the Universe known as dark energy remains outside our current understanding of physics. However, we find evidence for its existence in surveys of the distribution of matter. Maps of the universe allow us to track dark energy's behavior, bringing us closer to unraveling this riddle.

Dark Matter

The dynamics of the matter in galaxies visible to us can only be possible given the existence of a dark sector of matter we cannot see. As of yet, no satisfactory dark matter candidate has been provided to explain this observed behavior. We use computer simulations to study how different dark matter candidates imprint on visible matter, extracting predictions which can be used to test viable dark matter candidates.
(Credit: Spencer Scott)

Galaxy Evolution

Dark matter forms the seeds (called "halos") that eventually grow into galaxies. Thus, the properties of dark matter halos and their embedded galaxies are inevitably linked. Studying how dark matter shapes evolution of galaxies is the first step to understanding the physics responsible for the intricate panoply of galaxies we observe today.