Research
Since fall of 2020 I’ve been in Newark, Delaware working on the PUEO project (and its predecessor ANITA), which is a balloon-borne neutrino detector that flies over Antarctica with the aim of detecting radio signals produced by ultrahigh energy neutrinos interacting in the ice sheet. I primarily work on the navigation subsystem, which is the most critical part of the experiment – you can’t know where any signals are coming from if you don’t know where the payload is and how it’s oriented! A decent chunk of my time is also spent working on the simulation software for PUEO.
Before this, I was a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis. I worked on a different balloon experiment, X-Calibur, which detects polarized X-rays in order to learn about the geometry of compact objects such as black holes and neutron stars. I went to Antarctica for the launch of X-Calibur in 2018, where we got enough data to get a grant for XL-Calibur, which flew from Sweden across the ocean into Canada after I left the project.
