Research

My main interests (things I’ve worked on or would like to work on) are in observational cosmology and large-scale structure, CMB detector technology and instrumentation development, and analysis including CMB polarization, lensing, delensing, and parameter estimation from any and everything above. I also dabble in machine learning and deep learning, using them to better calibrate our data and potentially guide the design of future instruments.

I spent a lot of time in grad school detector testing, wire bonding, and designing bits and bobs to help make the first polarization-sensitive receiver on the SPT (SPTpol) as good as it could be.  A lot of other people did the same, but all the hard work paid off as in 2013 we published the first ever detection of lensing B-mode polarization in the CMB using data from the first year of SPTpol observations.  A few years on and several other experiments have measured lensing B modes, so they’re all the rage.  But everyone is trying to get rid of them through a technique called delensing so we can search for the much fainter primordial B modes that could be hiding underneath (and that’s really exciting stuff).

These days I focus on the analysis of CMB datasets (mostly the years of data we have in the can from the now decommissioned SPTpol camera). I have worked on calibration tasks, such as beam measurements and telescope pointing corrections, low-level data reduction and cleaning, map-generation, simulated observations, Fisher forecasting, and parameter estimation among other topics. I also wrote the likelihood extension to the commonly used CosmoMC package for parameter estimation that SPTpol power spectra analyses have since used. A lot goes into extractly roughly 10 numbers that encode the basic instructions for what the universe is made of and how it evolves from roughly 10 trillion raw detector timestream samples taken over five years, but it’s all a lot of fun!