I'm a fourth year grad-student in Physics at Drexel University. Hence the hostname for this page... My area of study is Astrophysics, particularly active galaxies and black holes. The shirt I'm wearing in the above picture is from the Saturn Orbit Insertion party at JPL which I attended while working for the INMS team on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn
As with most things I do, there's a lot of color around here, but not much substance. For now, here is an archive of my old site, previously hosted on Gridley (a student-run unix server), at Carleton. I think there is still a copy there, but I can't modify it any more...
Want to find me?
While you're here though, checkout the observatory website: I'm the new maintainer! I will be adding to it, as we take more images, and do more outreachy (is that a word? It is now!) things. Also, watch the public observing page for information about our open houses! Rain and clouds tend to cluster around those days, so if there is an observatory open house coming up, you should probably carry around a raincoat.
Alina and I recently got a dog. His name is Jupiter, and he is big, fuzzy and cute.
And while I'm sharing links, here's the page of a cute mathematician.
I am currently looking into the multi-wavelength properties of active galactic nuclei (AGN). As far as astronomers can tell, all galaxies have a huge black hole in their centers. Some of these monsters are actively accreting material, and producing a lot of light (from the high temperatures and powerful magnetic fields around them). Some are not; the black hole in the center of our galaxy is currently inactive. What determines when and how these so-called active galaxies turn on and off?
I initially gave a summary talk about where I was intending to go with this work, but it morphed (as such work often does) into something slightly different. My orals exam was on the preliminary results from this work. I am trying to measure the efficiency of accretion onto blackholes in nearby galaxies that are only slightly active. There are a lot of them, but their nuclear activity is very weak, so measuring it is a challenge. I also had to submit a paper on the results of my work, which is what the talk is based on. My current problems involve removing the stellar contamination from the optical and UV light and including infrared observations.
We have had a paper accepted into the January issue of the Astronomical Journal! Source Matching in the SDSS and Rass: which Galaxies are Really X-Ray Sources?" No citations yet... :( I have given two posters on related work, at the Seattle 2007 and Austin 2008 AAS meetings, respectively. Both posters seemed to be well received, as all the smaller copies I had made were gone by the end of each meeting.
As part of the followup to this work, I presented a poster at the 2008 SDSS "Asteroids to Cosmology" meeting in Chicago.
I've given a few talks at the astrophysics journal club. I did the first one in OpenOffice Impress, about the black hole at the center of our galaxy. The other two, on Measuring gas in galaxies and Cosmological parameters were done in lyx, and are in pdf format.
Though not directly research related, I think a couple of the summary papers I've done for my classes are particularly interesting. I worked with Hangbin Lin in Quantum III on the Zero-Point Energy. I also did some digging on Renormalization Group Theory for Statistical Mechanics II.
Though I'm co-president of the Physics Graduate Student Association, that doesn't obviate me from giving talks. My first talk was a whirlwind tour of the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn, but it didn't have slides, just a bunch of pictures in iPhoto. My second talk discussed why I personally am so afraid of global warming (original Keynote, exported pdf). It certainly created quite a bit of discussion, but I think some people were convinced of the danger.
In 2005, Prof. Dave Goldberg and I recieved an OSS/EPO grant from NASA (attached to his galaxy lensing research) to bring 6th graders to Drexel's Lynch Observatory. We also will host a astronomy referesher course for elementary school teachers. More information is available on the website. We've run four "Astronomy for Teachers" sessions, and had around 80-100 Philadelphia 6th grade and high school students come to the observatory.
While I'm self-promoting (that's what websites are for, no?), I was invited to give a talk at the Delaware Valley Amateur Astronomers meeting in February. The DVAA is an active group of amateurs, who have monthly meetings, and who try not to take astronomy, or themselves, too seriously. In my talk, I tried to answer the question, "Where have all the Quasars Gone?" (original Keynote) by describing what we currently know about the evolution of galaxies and their central supermassive black holes. The presentation (my first made in Keynote, which I quite like) included music and videos, which don't appear in the PDF.
I also spoke at the Rittenhouse Amateur Astronomers meeting in May (original Keynote, exported PDF about my prsent work, a bit about the Lynch Observatory, but mostly about my time with Cassini. It was odd giving a talk from the back of the Fels Planetarium at the Franlkin, while looking at the backs of everyone's heads.
