I am a recent Ph.D. from the Yale astronomy department. I have recently moved to the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. I grew up in sunny La Mirada, CA, and I completed my undergraduate education at U. C. Berkeley.
Back in elementary school, I remember squatting in the corner of the library, flipping through an astronomy book full of colorful pictures. On the very last page, it said that at the center of the galaxy there might be something called a black hole! I couldn't have possibly comprehended what that meant, but I was hooked.
Today, I perform theoretical research to improve our understanding of the creation and growth of supermassive black holes, which are now thought to lurk at the centers of every galaxy. I worked on early data from the Event Horizon Telescope, the world-wide interferometer which has provided us with the first image of a supermassive black hole! I have made predictions for what happens when a tight supermassive black hole binary tears apart and consumes a star. I have also spent time developing "semi-analytic models" of supermassive black hole growth, which try to reproduce all observables of the overall population of black holes with a series of physical prescriptions. Most recently, I have used the Romulus cosmological simulations in order to better understand the relationship between black holes and their host galaxies. If you are interested in this work, I invite you to browse the links at the top of the page.
Ph.D. Advisor: Priya Natarajan