I earned his Bachelor's degree in Physics in 2009 at the University of Maryland and my Ph.D. in Physics in 2015 at Caltech in LIGO Laboratory under Prof. Alan Weinstein. As a graduate student, I took the then-unusual career path of pursuing research in both gravitational-wave physics (working at LIGO Laboratory on real-time detection and localization of compact binaries) and optical astronomy (working with Palomar Transient Factory on pinpointing counterparts of gamma-ray bursts as a precursor to hunting for GW counterparts). After graduate school, I took a NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship with Dr. Neil Gehrels and soon after took a civil servant position as a research astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. My research includes gravitational-wave data analysis, compact binary mergers, gamma-ray bursts, Bayesian inference, high performance computing, operations research, and optical surveys. I like to develop great software tools to make data more readily available to the public. I am a passionate advocate of open source software and open data in science research, education, and government. Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with his son, camping with my son's Scout troop, going rock climbing, riding bicycles, exploring caves, and drinking a great deal of coffee.

Research Areas:

High-energy astrophysics

Time Domain Astronomy

Computation and Simulation

Research Centers & Collaborations: Joint Space-Science Institute

Facilities:

Supercomputing