Department/College/UnitPhysical & Biological Sciences Division

TitleGraduate Student Researcher

AffiliationGraduate

Other UCSC Campus AffiliationSanta Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP)

Primary Office LocationInterdisciplinary Sciences Building
317

Mail StopPhysics Department

Biography, Education and Training

I am from Columbus, Ohio and moved to Santa Cruz in 2021. I graduated from the Linworth Alternative Program in 2017 and received Bachelors' degrees in Mathematics and Physics from the Ohio State University in 2021. I have been studying nature on the smallest accessible scales with the ATLAS Experiment since 2019. In my free time I enjoy recreating in nature, primarily through climbing, skiing, cycling, and surfing.

Research Interests

I am primarily interested in how fundamental particles interact at the highest accessible energy scales. At the moment this is from studying the proton-proton collisions with the ATLAS Experiment delivered by Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC produces copious amounts of collimated strongly-interacting particles. These so-called jets are seeded from elementary quarks and gluons and understanding them is critical for the physics program at the LHC. My work since I joined in 2019 has focused on using machine learning techniques to both better identify events with jets of interest, such as production of highly boosted Higgs Bosons, as well as reducing the information saved from these events to improve the overall amount of events to be saved. I have also contributed to the upgrade of the Pixel detector for the ATLAS Inner Tracker Upgrade for the High-Luminosity LHC which will begin taking data in 2030.

Awards, Honors and Grants

2025 Breakthough Prize in Fundamental Physics (awarded to the ATLAS Collaboration)