About me
I am currently a sixth-year graduate student, part of the Survey Science Group here at the University of Washington. I have worked on a few different projects, including the cosmology analysis for the SDSS2 Supernova Survey (ADS link), nonlinear dimensionality reduction methods on large Astronomical Datasets (ADS link), weak gravitational lensing (ADS link), and observational consequences of modified gravity (ADS link). My thesis project involves tomographic mapping and cosmological constraints using Weak Gravitational Lensing. Currently I'm working closely on this with Bhuvnesh Jain and Mike Jarvis at University of Pennsylvania.
Though not technically part of my dissertation research, I'm very interested in various machine learning applications, especially unsupervised manifold learning methods for visualization of high-dimensional data. I've published the first use of Locally Linear Embedding for Astronomical data (ADS link) and contributed code related to this area to the open source packages scipy, MDP and scikit-learn.
Another of my interests is educational outreach. I spent a couple years coordinating our department's public outreach throuch the UW planetarium. This evolved into a role in a digital upgrade to the UW planetarium using Microsoft's World-Wide Telescope software (read more about our affordable digital dome project here).