About Me

My scientific passion lies in exploring the universe’s most extreme phenomena through the detection of ultrahigh energy (UHE) neutrinos. These particles are ghostly messengers from the most violent cosmic accelerators, potentially holding the key to understanding the long-standing mystery of where the highest-energy cosmic rays originate. Because these neutrinos are incredibly rare and interact so weakly, detecting them requires looking for subtle signals across vast natural detectors, which has led my research to focus on using the Antarctic ice sheet itself as a detection medium, searching for faint radio pulses generated via the Askaryan effect when a UHE neutrino interacts within the ice.

Much of my graduate work was centered on developing reconstruction techniques with the Askaryan Radio Array (ARA), an in-situ neutrino detector at the South Pole that leverages the Antarctic ice sheet as a detection medium and aims to measure the flux of UHE neutrinos above 100 PeV. This work involved detailed detector simulations, sophisticated signal processing, and confronting the challenges of analyzing data from a complex natural environment.

As a CCAPP Affiliate Fellow, I am actively involved in a next-generation balloon-borne experiment, the Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO). PUEO aims to detect neutrinos above 1 EeV by observing a higher target volume of many cubic kilometers during a ~40-day flight at an altitude of 20-30 km. It is a NASA Pioneers project and part of NASA’s Long Duration Balloon program. I have been assisting with the final construction and testing of the PUEO detector, which is slated for launch out of McMurdo, Antarctica in December 2025.