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Welcome to my website!

I am a Research Fellow at the Institute on the Environment (IonE) working at the intersection of data science and sustainability. A physicist by training, I have expertise in modeling, data analysis and visualization, and thinking about complex systems in general. I’ve become increasingly interested in the ecological overshoot crisis and questions around how humanity can create a more resilient, sustainable, and equitable future.

Research:

My current research focuses on the environmental impacts of land use in the United States. Agriculture now takes up nearly half of all habitable land on Earth (the majority of which goes to feeding livestock), and is one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss. At the same time, food is essential for human survival - so to create a sustainable world we must fix our agricultural system. I work on developing code for IonE’s Food System Supply-Chain Sustainability (FoodS3) model, which traces the impacts of US agriculture through the food supply chain. This will enable more accurate, region-specific carbon footprinting for the meat and dairy industries. I am also involved in a joint project between IonE and the US Forest Service on carbon accounting, using geospatial data to create detailed maps of carbon sources and sinks.

I started my academic career as a physicist, studying the astrophysics of compact objects. I wrote my PhD dissertation on black hole images from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an experiment to image the near-horizon region of a supermassive black hole for the first time. Building on existing data analysis techniques, but with a code designed from scratch, Sam Gralla and I investigated what these reconstructed images can tell us about the nature of the source. We published several papers analyzing the 2017 data on M87* (a super-massive black hole candidate located at the core of the galaxy M87) in which we confirm some of the EHT collaboration’s main results, and found something new: we show that a subtle change in the so-called ‘likelihood function’ used to compare model with data can affect one of the key parameters of interest, the width of the observed ring. The width is very interesting, as it has the potential to distinguish between different astrophysical situations. You can find these two papers here: Part 1, Part 2.

I also spent some time working on pulsars. Together with professors Dimitrios Psaltis and Feryal Ozel, we compared models of the ray-traced thermal emission from the neutron star surface with observational data from NASA’s NICER mission, in an effort to improve constraints on the mass-radius relationship of these amazing objects. Our paper on the subject can be found here.

Teaching:

I enjoy the challenge of boiling down complex problems and conveying abstract ideas to a general audience. I have several years’ experience as a teaching assistant (TA) for the freshman undergraduate physics courses at the University of Arizona: 141 (Mechanics) and 241 (Electricity & Magnetism).

I am a nationally ranked 5-dan Go player, and I have taught Go both in private lessons and group workshops.

My film:

From 2012-2016 I directed a feature-length documentary film, The Surrounding Game, about the game of Go. The project was a labor of love, a worldly adventure, and my attempt to synthesize all the emotions and philosophical questions the game inspires in me. The movie is available to buy or rent on the website through Vimeo-on-Demand - go watch it! Or see the Film tab for more info.