Before my time at UPenn, I was a student at Bayard Rustin High School in West Chester PA, where I was on a team that competed in the National Science Olympiad tournament. I earned 70+ medals throughout my career in topics such as astronomy and circuitry, including a 4th place national medal in the event "Fermi Questions" in which competitors answer order-of-magnitude estimation questions. I also participated in the Center for Talented Youth and Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences programs, where I gained valuable research experience and made lasting friendships.

While in college, I continued my involvement in Science Olympiad by volunteering as an astronomy and circuit lab test writer for various universities and competitions, including the UPenn, Yale, and Pennsylvania regional and state competitions.

In my sophomore year, I began an independent research project to try to quantify structures within the cosmic web using persistent homology. In my junior year, I became interested in cosmic void finder algorithms in Python and Julia, void clustering, and void shape statistics after I started working with UPenn Professor Ravi K. Sheth. The following summer, I spent just over 2 months in Groningen, Netherlands working with Rien van de Weijgaert at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute and Job Feldbrugge from the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics. There, I studied catastrophe theory and used caustics to trace filamentary features in the cosmic web in the IllustrisTNG simulations. I applied Rien's and Job's results from their 2017 paper, computationally extending their previous work of N-body caustics from 2D to 3D. Also during the summer, I attended a 10-week online summer school hosted by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. I took classes on quantum information, path integrals, symmetries, and computational methods including machine learning using PyTorch. I was also a guest at the 4th Information Universe Conference in Groningen.

Besides my academic interests, I enjoy rock climbing, table tennis, ultimate frisbee, biking, flying drones, Magic the Gathering, video games, and jazz. You won't have to look hard to find me at my favorite climbing gym on a Tuesday afternoon!