Urbanization and Heat Waves

In recent times, extreme heat waves are becoming more commonplace. In order to adequately prepare for such events it's important we devlop models which accurately assess the potential magnitude of these events, especially in major metropolitan locations.

My research aims to answer this question by incorporating urbanization as both a temporal and spatial predictor of temperature extremes. I utilize Bayesian inference and non-stationary extreme value theory in order to devlop models which accurately depict temperature extremes in urban centers. Additionally, my research incorporates various rural locations surrounding researched metropolitan locations in order to contrast my findings.

For more information of this project feel free to contact me or check out my repository here to get an idea of the type of backend I'm doing for this analysis. Additionally, this project was inspired by some extreme value analysis work I did over the fall for a final project. That repository is avaliable here and the paper written from that codebase is avaliable here.

X-ray Binary Formation and Evolution

These binary star systems are curious fellows, each comprised of a compact object (black hole or neutron star, usually) and a normal "donor" star transferring (accreting) material into the dense object. As the name suggests, these objects spew massive amounts of x-rays allowing them to be more easily detected by telescopes like Chandra. Beyond simply learning more about x-ray binary evolution, this research allows us to learn more about the evolution of compact objects as a whole, including the active galactic nucleus at the center of most galaxies.

I started working as a researcher under Dr. Bret Lehmer the summer before junior year. My initial involvement in Bret's research group mostly comprised of collaborating with another research group member Larissa Markwardt to develop a source catalogue of processed data for 16 early type galaxies to study the luminosity function variation in low-mass x-ray binaries.

My later work involved binning noisy source data from numerous x-ray observations for a spectral analysis. Finishing up my work with Bret I developed a catalogue of simulated spectral data which had been fit to simple power-law models. This catalogue allows one to pick up on possible distiguishable features hinting that a real spectral observation comes from this or that non-power-law model.

If you wish to read a more detailed discussion of my astrophysics research, including my software development process, most of my work is documented in a PDF which you can download here. My work simulating spectral data was mostly done the first semester of graduate school, so if you want more information on that you can contact me or Woody Gilbertson, a current member of Bret's group who continued the project after me. Additionally, a repository for that project is avaliable here and the repository for my project binning spectral data is avaliable here.