I was born in Florida and grew up in Maryland in a suburb of D.C. I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2005 with a B.S in Physics & Astronomy and a minor in Philosophy. I moved back to Maryland for graduate school at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, defending my thesis in April 2012 under advisor Alex Szalay. I am currently a postdoctoral researcher working with Kazuya Koyama at the Institue of Cosmology and Gravitation in Portsmouth, UK.
In my free time, I enjoy playing a variety of sports, doing yoga, reading fantasy novels, and baking delicious chocolate desserts. Music is very important to me and is always playing, whether at work, at home, or in my head.
I also spend a lot of time reading and thinking about the state of the world, and I maintain a personal blog where I write about philosophy, science, politics, religion, and other topics that interest me.
Though great advances have been made over the past decades to dissolve the institutionalized discrimination that plagued previous generations, biases remain, conscious or unconscious, that continue to prevent talented students and career scientists from advancing in academia, especially in the hard sciences.
At JHU I co-created PandA Diversity, which aims to increase the awareness of issues related to the under-representation of women and minorities in the fields of Physics and Astronomy. We held semi-regular meetings, each of which focused on a specific topic related to diversity and of interest to the local community both at JHU and STScI. We were excited to host Prof. Abigail Stewart in early 2012 to give a talk on unconscious bias.