My primary research work at GWU involved searching for and analyzing the afterglows of short gamma-ray bursts—powerful, extragalactic explosions resulting from binary neutron star merger events—using data from the NASA Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory's X-ray Telescope (XRT) and a number of optical observatories around the world. This work led to a conference presentation at the American Astronomical Society's 19^th High-Energy Astrophysics Division meeting in Pittsburgh, as well as a first-author publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. For more, see my GitHub repository for the project, my detailed writeup of the research, or the paper itself.

I also led the development of a public catalog of Be stars (massive B-type stars with distinct emission line spectra) that have been detected in X-rays, a characteristic that hints at the presence of a compact object binary partner such as a neutron star or black hole. The methodology behind the construction and open release of the catalog is described in a paper published in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society. The details of this work can be found on GitHub as well.

I am the author of asymmetric_uncertainty, a Python package that provides functionality for handling (and propagating) asymmetric numerical uncertainties (for example, the quantity 3.0^+0.2_−0.4). This tool has wide-ranging applications in many scientific and computational fields, and is designed for interoperability with other common Python libraries (such as numpy and matplotlib). The package is also capable of representing upper and lower limit quantities, for example by setting one side of the error to ± and the other to 0. The software is indexed on the Astrophysics Source Code Library, with ID [ascl:2208.005].

As a board member of the GWU chapter of the Society of Physics Students (SPS), I led a successful proposal to design, build, and launch a high-altitude ballon-based muon detector. Muons (μ) are charged elementary particles that are created as byproducts of collisions between incoming cosmic rays and molecules in the Earth's upper atmosphere, after which they shower down towards the ground at relativistic speeds. The instrument uses scintillator and Silicon photomultiplier technology—plus a complementary suite of in situ atmospheric sensors—to investigate the effects of altitude on muon concentration, and the degree to which muon flux is attenuated by the atmosphere.

Some other highlights of my instrumentation work include a slitless spectrograph for use with amateur-class (≲0.5-m) telescopes and general-purpose CCD/CMOS cameras, a multispectral camera system for mapping thermal emission using simultaneous visible/inrared imaging, and an end-to-end experimental design/apparatus for performing photometry and light-curve analysis to characterize LED output/response as a function of electrical input.