About Myself
I grew up in the northern Chicago suburbs with my mom, dad, and sister. Both of my parents are math teachers so I suppose it is not super surprising that I ended up getting very interested in mathematics in high school, along with physics. Thanks to some very influential teachers at Libertyville High School, I entered into Northwestern University as an undergraduate in 2007 already certain I wanted to study physics. While at Northwestern I worked with Vicky Kalogera and Tassos Fragos (as well as several others from NU and other institutions) on X-ray binary population synthesis models. In 2011 I received a B.A. in physics (concentration in astronomy) and mathematics with honors. My honors thesis modeled the evolution of the galaxy X-ray luminosity function using binary population synthesis models convolved with semi-analytic models of galaxy evolution. You can read the paper it resulted in here.
In the fall of 2011 I started my PhD at the University of Washington (Seattle) under the guidance of Fabio Governato and Tom Quinn (and a special thanks to my international thesis committee members, Marta Volonteri and Andrew Pontzen who had a very positive effect on my research and scientific development despite being an ocean away). I graduated in 2017 with a PhD in astronomy.
Seattle is a fantastic city and I was lucky enough to meet my now wife, Carrie, while living there. We got married in May 2016.
Since I started my postdoc at Yale University, we now live in New Haven, CT with our adorable, derpy cat, Banjo. I will now refrain from putting up millions of cat pictures, because this is a professional website and that doesn't seem very professional.... ok, fine, just one.
Whoops, I lied... here's one more!
Outside of work, I enjoy reading, shamelessly binge watching shows online, and playing board and video games. I have aspirations of writing science fiction stories, but lately most of my writing time is dominated by science. I enjoy beer and whiskey (rye, bourbon, and scotch varieties mostly) and I am trying to gain a better appreciation of wine. Progress is good on that front and mostly limited by my ability to remember wine names. My wife and I have a blog that we always mean to update and sometimes actually succeed. Check it out! Currently it is focused on board games, but we are thinking of expanding the content (and, you know, actually updating it with new posts).
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