Past Projects

My past projects have ranged from nuclear shockwave physics, to gravitational wave physics, to cosmology, to STEM education. From this, I learned the value of learning from data and the computational, mathematical, and software skills necessary to do this in a meaningful way.

Pomona College Senior Thesis Exercise

For my senior thesis work at Pomona college, I wrote a program to compare numerical integration schemes for Thomas Moore's Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) gravitational wave simulation program. LISA will be the first space-based gravitational-wave detector when it is launched in 2034 and will be sensitive to GWs that are out of range for our current ground based detectors. Professor Moore simulates gravitational waves from coalescing binary stars to 4/2 post-Newtonian order and predicts how precisely we can determine source parameter values from the received signal. My project received the "Distinction in Senior Thesis Exercise" from Pomona College.

Pomona College RAISE Grant Project: Educational STEM Youtube Videos

During summer of 2020, I spent my extra time in lockdown creating educational science videos. I received a grant from Pomona College to fund my work. One is about special relativity, one is about general relativity, and one (my favorite) is about trees.

Image Credit: Dara Storer

NSF Funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at University of Washington

In my REU project at University of Washington, I automated the detection and classification of erroneous signals in telescope data, caused by hardware malfunctions. I worked with Miguel Morales’ observational cosmology group whose goal is to map out the first stars ever formed by using data from the HERA radio interferometer in South Africa. HERA takes data over thousands of hours with over one hundred antennas, which makes it easy for a false signal to go unnoticed. This is why my work to automate the detection of false signals was important.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, High Energy Density Physics Intern - Summer 2

During my second summer at LLNL, I continued to investigate the discovery I made the previous summer (existence of water entrainment in nuclear detonations over water). We suspected that the water entrainment I discovered the previous summer led to shockwave energy loss that was not accounted for in published yields. The yield of a nuclear detonation is the single most important measurement that can be taken from the experiment because it tells us how much energy was released. I calculated a “correction factor” which could be applied to published yields to account for water-related energy losses in the shockwave. We calculated a 27% correction factor, which means that the true yeilds of the nuclear detonation were 27% larger than the published yields that national labs had been utilizing for the past 50 years.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, High Energy Density Physics Intern - Summer 1

In my first summer of research, I independently made a discovery that would ultimately lead to a Goldwater Scholarship and a summer internship award. It would also call the past 50 years of nuclear- weapon yield estimates into question. I worked with Greg Spriggs, who aims to calculate new yields for nuclear detonations by re-analyzing nuclear test films with modern technology. While looking at the films for fun after work, I discovered visual evidence of water entrainment in nuclear shockwaves traveling over water. This phenomenon was previously not known aobut and not integrated into nuclear shock wave models and yield calculation.