I’m a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the NSF-Funded Institute For AI and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI), where I use machine learning to study the astrophysical systems that the Universe lets us watch evolve in real time (supernovae, kilonovae, gamma-ray bursts, etc). I'm particularly interested in scalable techniques to infer a supernova's progenitor properties using synoptic surveys such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and translating noisy observations into robust and interpretable strategies for follow-up studies of peculiar transients. You can find me either at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics or the Lab for Nuclear Science at MIT.
I earned my Ph.D. in Astronomy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and spent some time as a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in Spring 2022.
Complementing my research goals, I’m also passionate about building community and creating welcoming spaces within astrophysics. I founded astro[sound]bites, the audio counterpart to the popular blog astrobites, to highlight the work of early-career scientists. During my Ph.D., I led Astronomy Cultural Journal Clubs at UIUC, and I've spearheaded outreach projects in the US, Gabon, and India. In my free time, you can find me practicing cello, biking, running (I ran my first marathon in 2021!), and reading. You can download my CV here.
Rubin, Roman, and JWST will revolutionize our understanding of the time-domain sky, but only if we have the architecture in place to investigate the weird, unexpected phenomena that they will discover. I develop fast, scalable methods to find and prioritize events within massive survey streams, and am an active member of the ANTARES alert broker.
The local environment where transients occur can provide tantalizing evidence for the nature of their progenitors. Within the Dark Energy Science Collaboration., I combine observations with state-of-the-art simulations to investigate these correlations for poorly-understood classes of events.
Data obtained in the first few days of an explosion provide an in-depth view into the final moments of a star's life and the earliest moments of its death. As a member of the Young Supernova Experiment, I search for these young transients and model signatures of shock breakout, CSM interaction, and flash ionization.
Multi-scale simulations are required to understand the atomic and molecular chemistry of the early Universe. At the Los Alamos National Laboratory, I built a chemical solver that runs inline with cosmological simulations and probed the abundances of formed CO, OH, and H2O.
An updated list of my publications can be found here:
ADS Publications
I maintain/contribute to multiple open source software projects.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| PHotometric Analysis Software Tools (PHAST) | A package for real-time transient classification using transient photometry and host galaxy information. |
| Simulated Catalog of Optical Transients and Correlated Hosts (SCOTCH) | A set of analysis tools for simulating transient-host galaxy correlations for common (SNe Ia/II/Ibc) and rare (KNe) classes of events, and a catalog of 5M simulated events. | SuperNova ANAlysis package (SNANA) | A software pipeline for simulating transients and generating realistic host galaxy properties. |
| Galaxies Hosting Supernovae and other Transients (GHOST) | A package for associating transients with their most likely host galaxies and estimating host photo-zs. |
Through UIUC's Society for Equity in Astronomy (SEA), I organized and led monthly discussions on topical issues in equity and inclusion.
I am a creator and former host of the podcast astro[sound]bites, where I discuss recent astronomy research with other graduate students. We amplify the voices of early-career scientists through regular interviews and explore sound-based representations of astronomy data. To date, we've published over 95 episodes, received outreach grants from the ASP, AGU, and AAS, and have listeners in 56 countries. Find our website here.
![Astro[sound]bites crew showing off some podcast swag.](images/asb.jpeg)
From 2021 to 2023, I was a local organizor for UIUC's chapter of Astronomy on Tap, which took place at The Literary in downtown Champaign the third Thursday of every month. In October 2023, I gave my most recent Astronomy on Tap talk (now in Boston!) on The Stargazing Machine: Building Software to Study Cosmic Explosions (and End World Hunger)".
As part of the 2017 Story of Space, an exploration of the overlap between astronomy and art, I designed and implemented an interactive exhibit exploring the chemical composition of the universe through sound. The exhibit ran for a week in Goa, India and reached thousands of members of the public. Read more about it here and here.
