Research

The big picture

Galaxies aren't scattered randomly across the sky. Their spatial distribution carries a faint record of what happened in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Think of it like the ripples left on a pond after a stone is thrown in: by studying their patterns carefully, you can learn something about the stone. My Ph.D. research looked for signs of new quantum fields that were present during cosmic inflation, a period in which the very early universe underwent exponentially fast expansion, using the clustering of galaxies measured by the BOSS survey, and forecasted the sensitivities of future galaxy surveys to these novel signatures.

As an undergraduate student, I studied how the distortion of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) due to intervening matter (gravitational lensing) is correlated with the positions of distant quasars, and used this information to infer the clustering properties of the quasar population.

This background shapes my teaching: I enjoy bringing estimation, data and computation into various levels of undergraduate physics courses, and I'm happy to mentor undergraduate research projects that make use of data analysis and scientific computing.