Personal profile

Personal profile

I joined the faculty at UIUC as an Assistant Professor in 2019.

I did my undergraduate work studying comets that masquerade as asteroids with Prof. Linda French at Illinois Wesleyan, graduating in 2005. My graduate work was on refining the measurement of how fast the Universe is expanding using type Ia supernovae, and I worked with Profs. Christopher Stubbs and Robert Kirshner at Harvard, earning my Ph.D. in 2013.

I was a postdoctoral scholar at NSF's National Optical & Infrared Astronomy Laboratory (NOIRLAB, then NOAO) with Drs. Tom Matheson and Abi Saha, spending many nights atop beautiful Kitt Peak in the Sonoran desert, working on the ANTARES alert broker and flux-calibrating a network of DA white dwarfs for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) currently being comissioned in Chile. I deepened  my involvement with LSST as the Barry M. Lasker Data Science Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, MD.

I've been working with students throughout my time as a postdoc, and deeply value the mentor-mentee relationship. I think we are privilged to study the cosmos, and am deeply committed to public outreach. When I'm not working, you can find me hiking, or behind a camera lens, invariably accompanied by astro-dogs Kepler and Archimedes.

If you'd like to get in touch, shoot me an email, or swing by my office - always happy to get a cup of coffee.

Research Interests

Cosmology
Time-domain Astrophysics
Survey Science
Multi-messenger Astrophysics
Statistics
Data Science
Machine learning
Supernovae

Professional Information

My research interests lie at the intersection of multi-messenger and time-domain astrophysics, cosmology, statistics and data science. I work on wide-field surveys developing machine learning (particularly neural network-based) methods for real-time detection and classification of variable and transient sources, Bayesian models for cosmological inference with type Ia supernovae, and establishing an all-sky network of faint spectrophotometric standards for LSST, NGRST and future projects.

I am Analysis Coordinator for LSST's Dark Energy Science Collaboration (formerly deputy Analysis Coordinator and convener of the Time Domain Working Group), co-PI of the Young Supernova Experiment. I am also a PI of the SCiMMA Team (https://scimma.org). I've been a member of the Pan-STARRS, ESSENCE, Foundation, MzLS, SIRAH, and RAISIN surveys, among others.

Office Address

1002 W. Green Street, Rm. 129,
Urbana, IL 61801

Office Phone

Education/Academic qualification

Physics, Ph.D., Harvard University

Award Date: May 30 2013

Physics, B.S. (Hons), Illinois Wesleyan University

Award Date: Jun 5 2007

Keywords

  • QB Astronomy
  • cosmology
  • supernovae
  • multi-messenger astrophysics
  • dark energy
  • kilonovae
  • survey science
  • deep learning
  • artificial intelligence
  • machine learning
  • data analysis

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