Who am I?

I'm a second year graduate student in the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University in New York. I'll happily study anything that spins. I spend my days crashing galaxies into each other. I don't know which end of a telescope is which.

I also write, talk and occasionally film all kinds of science outreach.

My interests

Galaxy evolution

How do galaxies grow, move and interact? I've focused on the recent life of massive galaxies, and how a history of collisions and accretion lead to them losing their spin.

Dynamics

An orbit is a beautiful thing, a hundred are not. Perplexingly a million might be. I'm interested in going from the mapped motion of a single point to the swelled tide of an ensemble to make sense of the cavorting motions of stars and galaxies.

Cosmological simulations

For all that is too big, too small, too fast or too slow to observe, why not just make it up ourselves? I've worked both building and analysing grand-scale simulations like Illustris and Enzo

Pencil and paper astronomy

It's a lofty dream, but I aim to spend as much time scribbling on the back of envelopes as possible.