I am a Miller Fellow ('26-'29) in astrophysics at the Miller Institute for Basic Science at Berkeley. Previously, I was a Black Hole Explorer Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University's Black Hole Initiative. I completed my Ph.D. as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at Las Cumbres Observatory at UC Santa Barbara, under Prof. D. Andrew Howell, and hold a B.S. in Physics at University of Massachusetts Boston.

I study compact objects: the neutron stars and black holes left behind when massive stars die, where matter is compressed beyond anything that can be reproduced in a laboratory and spacetime is curved strongly enough to trap light. My work centers on measuring compact object spin, which fixes the geometry of the surrounding spacetime, supplies the energy that drives the most powerful phenomena in the universe, and preserves a record of how each object was assembled. Spin has historically been difficult to constrain without appealing to uncertain models of the surrounding matter, and most existing measurements remain correspondingly indirect.

My primary interest is in direct measurements of compact object spin along two complementary lines. For supermassive black holes, I work with the photon ring, a lensed image feature predicted by general relativity whose shape is determined by the spacetime rather than by the accreting plasma; towards this, I contributed to the Event Horizon Telescope’s first images of M87* and Sgr A*, and I now lead spin-inference development for the Black Hole Explorer mission. In neutron stars, I hunt the “chirping” modulation imprinted on supernova light curves as a newborn magnetar’s fallback disk is dragged by the rotating spacetime around it, leading both the search for new examples in time-domain surveys and the theoretical work required to interpret them.