Research and Teaching
The common thread throughout my research has been galaxies. I tried a stellar research project right after graduating high school, and found that it wasn't my thing. I was actually afraid astronomy in general wasn't my thing and I was making a massive mistake by planning to study it. It turns out, I was just more of a galaxy guy. After a couple of undergraduate research projects working on things like galactic spectra and the analysis pipeline for a galactic archaelogy survey, I learned that larger scales and astrostatistics interest me the most. These days at Vanderbilt, I work on large scale structure of the universe. I've gone from individual galaxies to groups of galaxies, and I'm building a probability and dynamics based group finder that determines which galaxies in a catalog inhabit the same dark matter halo.
At some point during undergrad I realized that research really wasn't what I wanted to do long-term. In a research group meeting with my summer advisor, I looked at him and all of his accomplishments, and realized that if I wanted to be an academic, he was the embodiment of success in that realm. But I was honest with myself about the fact that if I woke up in 20 years doing exactly what he's doing, I wouldn't be happy. After that summer, I looked inward to figure out what aspect of astronomy truly moved me. Communicating it to the public is what gives my work value, hence my hard pivot to planetariums and museum oriented goals.
During graduate school, I've collaborated with Metro Nashville Public Schools to create video content guiding middle schoolers through astronomy citizen science projects, I spent a year teaching a weekly science lab to seventh graders, and I developed a week-long interdisciplinary summer course for high schoolers mixing music, biology, sociology, and literature with dark matter astrophysics and computer science. I have also worked with the Sudekum Planetarium at Nashville's Adventure Science Center to update educator guides for the planetarium shows on offer. See my CV below for all the details, and do fill out the contact form if you'd like to invite me to speak about my science or interdisciplinary and socially conscious pedagogy. Course resources for my Dark Matter in Astronomy and Beyond course can be found on the Links and Resources page.