A wedding dance with the love of my life, surrounded by friends and family at our alma mater, Westminster College. Fun fact: we chose our first dance song as we walked onto the dance carpet.
This page is under construction
I'm currently at the SETI Institute, funded on a NASA XRP grant (PI Ann Marie Cody) to search for Boyajian Star analogs in light curves from the TESS Full Frame Images, i.e. weirdly dimming stars. Boyajian's Star exhibited a really weird dimming every now and again, and it doesn't look like anything we've seen before, but we don't reckon it's the only one of it's kind, just exceedingly rare. Our approach to finding similar objects is to look at millions of light curves for millions of stars, looking for things that are exceedingly rare with anomaly detection, figuring that rare things should be weird (almost by definition). On the SETI side of things (the only side of things if you only read the popular articles), we're hoping against hope that some portion of these might look like the shadows cast by gigantic constructions, otherwise known as megastructures, around a star. The thinking goes that if we continue to grow our own Earth based technological prowess we'll need more and more power from the sun, and we'll construct bigger and bigger structures to capture more of the Sun's energy. If we're on track to do something like this, maybe other technologically savvy entities, too, would do so too. On that off chance, if it's out there we hope to find it, and if it's not, it's another data point for the types of technosignatures that are available to find, or else that we're capable of finding.
I'm still working on populating this page, if you'd like to know more about my research, please take a look at my papers and GitHub repositories (messy though they are), or reach out to me directly.