I completed my Bachelor's in Physics at The Pennsylvania State University from 2017-2021. Currently, I am a Ph.D. student at University of Pittsburgh and expect to graduate in 2027.
Research Interests:
My current research is on emission line galaxy selection for DESI-2 using photometric redshifts from COSMOS2020.
For this project, I am working with Dr. Jeffrey Newman and Dr. Brett Andrews at the University of Pittsburgh. Soon,
I will be transitioning to work on photometric redshift calibration for the NASA Roman Space Telescope.
Publications: Coming soon to an archive near you!
Research
Photometric Redshift Calibration for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
A key science goal of Roman will be to probe the physics of cosmic acceleration via measurements of structure growth using weak gravitational lensing.
Weak gravitational lensing is a statistical measurement of the coherent distortion and alignment of background sources due to the masses of foreground objects (i.e. galaxy clusters).
Precise information about the photometric redshift (photo-z) distribution of lensed galaxies is required for this measurement, and different calibration methods for this have been developed.
One of these methods, called clustering redshifts, measures the cross-correlation between a spectroscopic and photometric sample of galaxies to recover or calibrate the photo-z distribution.
I made this short animation to illustrate the basic principles of the technique with a simple toy model. The left panel plots the correlation strength as a
function of real-space separation. The right panel plots the photo-z distribution, where the true distribution is in blue and the reconstructed distribution is in red. For my thesis project, I
will be developing infrastructure to constrain large-scale-structure galaxy bias for the Roman cosmology pipeline (and potentially LSST).
Emission-line Galaxy Target Selection for DESI-II
DESI will produce the largest three-dimensional map of the universe to date in order to better understand the nature of dark energy,
responsible for the universe's accelerated expansion. To trace the expansion history, DESI will measure the redshift
of millions of galaxies by the end of the five-year survey. In cosmology, redshift is a proxy for distance. One type of galaxy DESI will
target are Emission-line Galaxies (ELGs), which have strong emission features that make measuring redshifts easier. The focus of my work has
been to design and test better ELG selections for future DESI-like surveys with the aid of better imaging. The histogram above shows the spectroscopic
redshift (spec-z) distribution of current DESI ELGs (grey) and two other samples (blue/orange) I have optimized for future spectroscopic surveys, with
the dashed vertical lines indicating the intended redshift of the samples between 1.1 and 1.6. Compared to the current ELGs, my selection yields much denser
samples with higher efficiency in the fraction of galaxies in the correct redshift range. Combining current DESI ELGs with either sample would reduce
random errors by about a factor of two and help provide stronger cosmological constraints.
Talks
Spotlight Talk at Summer 2024 DESI Meeting
A short presentation on my ELG Target Selection work at the summer 2024 DESI meeting in the city of Marseille.
Teaching: Teaching is something I am very passionate about. During my undergrad at Penn State, I tutored physics and mathematics.
In addition to this, I became a learning assistant for a modern physics course where I encouraged independent learning to the students.
I plan to teach as a teaching assistant during my time at the University of Pittsburgh before graduation.
Outreach: I consider myself an advocate for higher education. After my first year of undergrad, I went back
to my high school and gave a talk to seniors on "The Importance of College". Recently, in the summer of 2022, I gave a
talk on "Optimizing the College Experience" to a group of incoming Penn State freshmen.
