Research

I have participated in physics and astronomy research across a range of topics. Here I provide a brief summary of the work I've done in anti-chronological order. More information can be found in my CV.

• Laboratory for Physical Science I am currently working in the integrated photonics group at LPS. Integrated photonics has a wide range of possible applications in sensing, high-speed networking, and quantum computing. I am currently collaborating across research groups to develop a novel method for integrating 2D materials into photonics. 2D materials such as graphene and TMDs have many interesting physical properties and can be coupled with photonics devices to provide optical modulation. This work is Funded by the Pathway to Physics PhD (P^3) program.

• ¡MIRA! Scholar Program I previously worked with NAU assistant professor Dr. Ryan Behunin on research funded by The Center for Materials Interfaces in Research & Applications (¡MIRA!). Dr. Behunin specializes in the physics of fluctuation-induced phenomena, optomechanics, and quantum systems. My research was focused on stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). Our interest in understanding the threshold behavior of SBS led to the discovery of a potential mechanism for producing octave-spanning harmonics in cascaded SBS lasers.

• Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory I participated in a Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) with PPPL in the Summer of 2022. I worked with faculty, graduate students, and postdocs from Princeton University on a project concerning magnetic mirrors. Mirrors are one approach to achieving magnetic confinement fusion. My research focused on axial asymmetry in these mirrors. I found a potential mechanism for preferential detrapping of ions in a mirror using simulations written in Python.

• Lowell Observatory For the 2022/23 academic year, I was supported by a NASA Space Grant to work with Dr. Jeffrey Hall and Dr. Joe Llama at Lowell Observatory. This work involved the development of a pipeline for reducing a stellar activity index from spectra collected by the EXPRES instrument on the Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT). This extends a unique data set based on Ca emission that now spans a 50-year-plus timescale. This metric is important for understanding the solar-stellar connection.

• NASA Goddard Heliophysics Division  In the summer of 2021, I interned with NASA Goddard on a solar physics project concerning the characterization of coronal holes. These are areas where the sun's magnetic fields open up to the rest of the solar system, releasing super-heated plasma as solar wind. I was tasked with characterizing the boundary regions of coronal holes. My approach was to borrow tools from fractal analysis and medical imaging to assign these boundary regions a fractal dimension. This effectively quantified the complexity in these regions.

• NASA Ames Research Center In the Spring of 2021, I worked with Dr. Randolf Klein, an instrument scientist for the SOFIA observatory. He was interested in building an age sequence for young massive stars. That is, stars 10-100 times the mass of the sun in the early stages of their evolution. These are deeply embedded in clouds of gas and dust and must be studied by their spectral energy distribution and modeled via radiative transfer models. I extended the work of a previous intern and corroborated the results with an age sequence based on astrophysical masers.