Cosmologist. Red panda enthusiast. Black belt. Amateur musician.

Professional

I received my BS with a double major in physics and astronomy from The Ohio State University in May 2014. I then went to the University of Arizona for grad school where I worked with Dr. Eduardo Rozo in the physics department. I completed my PhD in October 2020, and the title of my dissertation was Enabling Galaxy Clustering and Dynamics as Tools of Precision Cosmology.

While at Ohio State, I spent the summer of 2012 working with the Ohio State Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) group. In 2013, I began working with Dr. Jennifer Johnson and Dr. Sarah Schmidt in the Department of Astronomy as part of the Summer Undergraduate Research Program in Astrophysics, and I continued working with them through July 2014. That project was working to callibrate the relationship between color, temperature, and metallicity for M dwarf stars with high-resolution spectra. The goal was to then use that relation to search for low-metallicity M dwarfs in data with lower resolution spectra but for which many more stars were observed. This research resulted in several posters and my undergraduate thesis, and a continuation of the project including a second year of data as well as a cross match between three different surveys resulted in my first paper.

The bulk of my research as a graduate student focused on galaxy clustering cosmology, especially in photometric galaxy surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). My projects included developing a new method to use galaxies with photometric redshifts for baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) analyses (for a nice description of BAO, see here), mitigating the effects of observing conditions on the observed galaxy density, and a developing and forecasting a novel way to measure the Hubble constant.

As a grad student, I also worked in the DES collaboration as well as the Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) of LSST, primarily within the large scale structure working group of each.

Personal

I studied karate for 6 years while in grade school, and attained the rank of third degree black belt. In addition to this, I was an instructor, especially for the kid’s program at my karate school. I’m currently looking to start up some form of martial arts again.

I love music, and I play flute, piccolo, and some piano. I am also actively involved with my church music program, as a member of both the adult handbell choir and the chancel choir, in which I sing second soprano.

I am an occaisonal knitter, although I always feel guilty that I don’t spend more time on it.

Red pandas are my favorite animal ever! They are just so adorable, especially sleeping in a tree using their tails as a blanket. My boyfriend and I enjoy traveling to different zoos (especially with red pandas), and we have also done a wildlife encounter with them. I donate/ask for people to make donation in my name to the red panda network, and think it would be awesome to go on one of their eco-trips in the future.