I am a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University studying high energy phenomenology under Dr. Matthew R. Buckley. Please use the top navigation bar to access important information such as my list of publications, a description of my research, publicly available code, and my résumé. Whatever reason you find yourself here, I hope you find something useful here.

Below I include a summary of my research and general interests.

Research Overview

My main interests lie beyond our most successful physical models of fundamental physics: (1) the standard model of particle physics, (2) the ΛCDM model of cosmology, and (3) general relativity. The dark matter is the most promising object of study that goes beyond the above models, as the evidence suggests it has a particle nature and it affects the observable Universe through its gravitational interactions. Though I have an affinity for theory, I believe the most important progress to be made in understanding the dark matter requires increasing our available data and improving our techniques for processing it.

I adopted this opinion during my first Ph.D. project on inferring limits on macroscopic dark matter with Gaia wide binaries, where I got to better understand both the existing degeneracy in viable dark matter models that can explain the available data and the power that cutting edge data processing can have in constraining dark matter models. Moving forward with this opinion, I am now analyzing the Fermi-LAT dataset to better understand the so-called Galactic Center Excess–an inability for our best models to fit the available $\gamma$-ray data around the center of the Galaxy. The shape and energies of the excess is suggestive of a dark matter origin, as we would expect dark matter to concentrate at the centers of galaxies in a spherically symmetric configuration and annihilate into high-energy $\gamma$-rays. However, we also don’t have a firm understanding of possible astrophysical $\gamma$-rays in the galactic center. Therefore, the problem is two-fold: learning about the $\gamma$-ray emission at the center while accounting for the high astrophysical uncertainties in the models that we use to explain the data.