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.

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.