As a high energy physicist, I study the smallest building blocks of matter. The standard model (SM) of particle physics provides a catalog of all the known fundamental particles and their interactions, and it can successfully describe many (but not all!) of the observations made by experiments so far.  The most recent addition to the SM, the Higgs boson, was predicted in the early 1960’s to explain how other particles acquire mass and was discovered in 2012 during the first run of high energy proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). 

Much remains to be understood about the Higgs boson and its interactions, and the LHC is the only collider on earth capable of producing enough Higgses to make sensitive measurements.  My research focuses the production of high energy Higgs bosons at the CMS experiment; these processes can teach us about new physics phenomena that may occur at high energy scales. 

The upcoming High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) accelerator upgrade will provide an unprecedented volume of data to the CMS experiment. By the end of the HL-LHC program, we expect to have produced 100 times more Higgses than we had at the time of the particle’s discovery!  The Phase 2 upgrade of the CMS detector will introduce new and updated detector subsystems that provide enhanced measurement capabilities and radiation hardness. At Cornell, we are working on the construction, commissioning, and integration of the Phase 2 forward pixel detector (TFPX), a silicon semiconductor tracking detector that will be located near the heart of the CMS detector. 

Beyond the CMS experiment, I work on the development of novel approaches to fast silicon detector readout electronics that perform physics-motivated data reduction with machine learning.  The next generation of particle detectors will need to process large volumes of data at high rates, and custom intelligent readout electronics will enable silicon pixel detectors to be used to their fullest capacity in future experiments. 

Ph.D., Physics, University of California, Berkeley, 2020

B.A., Physics, Columbia University, 2014