I’m an NSF Fellow in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where I use early-time data and machine learning to study the astrophysical systems that the Universe lets us watch evolve in real time (supernovae, kilonovae, gamma-ray bursts, etc). I was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in Spring 2021. I received my Bachelor’s degree in Computational Modeling and Data Analytics from Virginia Tech.
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. I also lead 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 and running (I ran my first marathon in 2021!), and learning about the incredible diversity of animals with which we share the planet. 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.
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 the Society for Equity in Astronomy (SEA), I organize and lead monthly discussions within my department on topical issues in equity and inclusion. Notes from this semester's discussions can be found below.
I am a creator and 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 72 episodes, received outreach grants from the ASP, AGU, and AAS, and have listeners in 56 countries. Find our website here.
I'm a local organizor for UIUC's chapter of Astronomy on Tap, which takes place at The Literary in downtown Champaign the third Thursday of every month. I've given two talks to date, the most recent in Fall 2021 titled 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.
