I am currently a Data Scientist at Cascade Data Labs in Portland, Oregon.

I have a PhD in astrophysics from Arizona State University. While at ASU, I used computer simulations to study wind-cloud interactions to better understand the gas around galaxies.

I also have on-going personal data science projects including a book recommendation app and ASL image classification.

Research

Projects

Galactic outflows play a significant role in the way a galaxy evolves. The outflowing winds, propelled by star formation, can pull metal-enriched gas out of the galaxy limiting the galaxy’s resources for further star formation. Observations of outflows provide evidence that hot and cold material coexist, despite the expectation that cloud material would be quickly destroyed by the winds.

In order to understand the broad impact of these winds, we need to understand how they interact with the circumgalactic medium. My work focuses on studying how strong winds interact with the cold circumgalactic clouds, investigating the ways the winds tear apart and inject energy into the clouds.


Book Recommender:  I have created a user-based collaborative filtering recommender system to generate book recommendations based on the reviews of similar readers. The recommendation system has been implemented in such a way to grow the database of reviews with additional user input, and exists within the framework of a Flask app deployed on Heroku for users to log-in to receive and save reviews.

ASL image classification: In the early stages of a larger project to detect hands in real time to recognize the ASL alphabet, I have trained a Neural Network to recognize the static letters of the ASL alphabet. 

Progress towards these projects is documented in blog posts.

Latest Blog Posts

In order to make the book recommendation algorithm discussed in the previous post usable, I needed to develop a user interface and database for storing a user’s ratings. I choose to make an app with Flask. I started from the tutorial on the Flask site which […]
I listen to a lot of audiobooks and often find myself seeking out “similar books” as soon as I finish one. So I am constantly looking for new books to read. Usually, the best recommendations come from my husband, who reads a lot of the same […]
If you’ve delved into the realm of machine learning, it’s very likely that you’ve heard of neural networks. They were once a novel idea to approach the problem of programming computers to make decisions on their own – the early days of artificial intelligence. Over the […]