Primary Research: Galactic Feedback
How gas behaves in galaxies is quite compex and involves many phenomena on a range of scales. My research focuses on two of those: the feedback processes
associated with supermassive black holes and stellar winds/supernovae. The former occurs when supermassive black holes are accreting
large amounts of material, becoming what we call Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). Much of the energy of the accreted material does not
fall into the black hole, but is rather ejected out into the galaxy, impact baryon cycles and in some cases shutting off star formation.
But there is still much about the details of AGN processes that is not understood. My work approaches this problem from a computational perspective,
attempting to constrain the wide range of AGN feedback treatments present in cosmological hydrodynamic simulations like SIMBA, EAGLE, and IllustrisTNG.
To help set limits on key parameters of AGN feedback like energetic efficiencies and mass loadings, I compare simulations of thermal x-ray emission
and the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect against observations from SRG/eROSITA and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. Additionally, I study stellar feedback
in the starburst galaxy M82. My work involves modelling hot outflows powered by supernovae and stellar winds and comparing against
novel observations from the X-ray space telescope XRISM.Overal, this works strives to span the boundary between theory and observation by using direct comparisons to help interpret observations and to pin down
more of the physics that goes into simulations.
Astronomy
Education Research
I am also involved in several astronomy education research projects, all focused around online communities. One project involves understanding the
motivations and participation levles in Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCS.
I am using data from three MOOCs available on Coursera covering topics
of general astronomy, astrobiology, and the history and philosophy of astronomy. MOOCs are quickly growing in popularity as they provide a mean for non-traditional leaners
to explore science. Understanding who exactly is participating in these courses, why they choose to participate, and what sort of factors lead to success
is an important field of research as more classes transition to online formats. While this work is quantitative in nature, I am also well-versed in qualitative research.
Over the past few years I have interviewed undergraduate students taking an online course-based research experience in order to understand how participation in
this course impacts various affective outcomes such as sense of belonging, self-efficacy, and science identity.
Conducting this sort of research is important to me as someone who is not only interested in astrophysics, but also education and teaching.
The research we do in the field is meaningless unless it can be adequately communicated to the public as a whole, in both and academic and
informal settings. I believe working in education research helps me build a different set of skills while also reminding me that the ultimate
goal of science is to advance human knowledge as a whole, and we should be working to develop the passions of the next generation of scientists.
Undergraduate Research:
Assymetric Dark Matter
In my undergraduate studies at Whitman College, I presented the following research as an Honors Thesis.
Asymmetric Dark Matter (ADM) is gaining traction as an interesting alternative to the more broadly studied Collisionless Cold Dark Matter (CCDM)
Paradigm. ADM particles can interact, scattering and even forming bound states. Given a simplistic model of the dark sector consisting of a fermionic dark
particle and a massive scalar mediator, it could be possible to form bound states with upwards of billions of constituents.
However, as in the early universe nucleosynthesis of baryonic matter, bottlenecks to the formation of bound states could exist.
In this work, we considered several factors that could lead to bottlenecks, and placed constraints on the parameter space of the dark sector
that would allow such bottlenecks to be bypassed. We also presented a broader review of the motivations for Self-Interacting and Asymmetric Dark Matter,
as well as some of the impacts these dark matter models would have on astrophysical objects and phenomena.
You can read my thesis in its entirety here.