I am pursuing a PhD in Physics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, working with Professors Nicholas Law and Igor Andreoni. My research focuses on the dynamic sky. We seek to discover cosmic explosions while they are still ongoing and to follow them up with some of the world's largest telescopes, primarily the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope in Chile. My work spans this entire process from building the telescopes and software pipelines that first uncover these events to the analysis of follow-up data which probes some of the most extreme environments in the universe.
Tidal Disruption Events: Among all the things that go boom in the night, by far my favorite are Tidal Disruption Events, occurring when an unlucky star passes too close to a black hole and is torn apart by its extreme gravitational forces, creating a bright flare that can be seen billions of light years away.
Animation Credit: Science Communication Lab
Machine Learning: I develop computer vision and other machine learning models for the Argus Array, an all-sky ultra high-cadence optical survey currently in development at UNC.