About me

I’m a research associate professor in the Physics and Astronomy department at the University of Pittsburgh. I earned my Ph.D. in Astronomy from The Ohio State University and my B.S. in Physics and Astronomy from Yale University.

My current research focuses on:

• estimating photometric redshifts of galaxies using deep capsule networks and developing better uncertainty quantification methods (w/ Biprateep Dey, Ashod Khederlarian, Emma Moran, and Jeff Newman),
• characterizing the relationship between galaxy photometry, emission lines, and photometric redshifts (w/ Ashod Khederlarian, Yoki Salcedo, Finian Ashmead, and Jeff Newman)
• constraining hard-to-determine properties of our own Milky Way (e.g., the UV-to-IR spectral energy distribution) by using statistical methods, such as Gaussian Process Regression, to leverage large samples of similar galaxy (w/ Cat Fielder and Jeff Newman), and
• measuring the mass-metallicity relation for massive galaxies at z ~ 0.8 with LEGA-C (w/ Zach Lewis, Mariah Jones, Katie Mack, and Rachel Bezanson).

I am a core developer of Marvin, a data access, exploration, analysis, and visualization toolkit for the SDSS-IV MaNGA survey (w/ Brian Cherinka, Jose Sanchez-Gallego, and Joel Brownstein).

My Ph.D. research explored the growth and evolution of galaxies as traced by changes in the abundance of chemical elements in their gas (w/ Paul Martini) and stars (w/ David Weinberg and Jennifer Johnson). I developed a code called flexCE to make theoretical predictions for the chemical evolution of a galaxy over its lifetime.