About me

I’m a research associate professor in the Physics and Astronomy department at the University of Pittsburgh.

Photometric redshifts are crucial for cosmology, galaxy evolution, and transient studies from massive imaging surveys such as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). My research focuses on developing machine learning and statistical techniques to improve photo-z’s:

• deep learning photo-z models (w/ Biprateep Dey, Ashod Khederlarian, Emma Moran, and Jeff Newman),

• uncertainty quantification methods to produce more accurate photo-z probability distributions (w/ Biprateep Dey, Ann Lee, Rafael Izbicki, and Jeff Newman),

• constructing spectroscopic datasets to train and calibrate photo-z methods (w/ Biprateep Dey and Jeff Newman),

• characterizing how spectroscopic training sets are biased relative to photometric samples (w/ Ashod Khederlarian, Marcos Tamargo-Arizmendi, and Jeff Newman),

• mitigating biases in spectroscopic training sets (w/ Finian Ashmead and Jeff Newman),

• calibrating photo-z distributions using galaxy cross-correlation methods (Yoki Salcedo, Tianqing (TQ) Zhang, and Jeff Newman), and

• designing an emission line galaxy sample for baryon acoustic oscillations with DESI-2 (Yoki Salcedo and Jeff Newman).

Collaborations:

• Roman HLIS (High Latitude Imaging Survey) Cosmology PIT (Project Infrastructure Team)
• Roman Science Collaboration
• LSST DESC (Dark Energy Science Collaboration)
• DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument)