G’day! I’m an astrophysics postdoctoral researcher at ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.
My research focus is the epoch spanning from the first light we can see in the CMB, through the following Dark Ages, into the Cosmic Dawn in which the first stars fired up, and through the Epoch of Reionization, in which the vast sea of neutral hydrogen gas between the forming galaxies was ionized — the last great phase transition of the Universe. These epochs, beginning just 379,000 years into the Universe’s 14 billion year history, and ending almost 6 billion years later, are key to answering many questions we have about how stars and galaxies form and evolve, and also about the background Dark Matter that sets the structures in place.
I use massive low-frequency radio telescopes like HERA and the MWA to attempt to detect an extremely faint (but thoroughly pervasive) signal emitted by the neutral hydrogen during the Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionization.
I’m also super interested in statistics (mostly Bayesian), scientific and open-source code (mostly Python, but C, Fortran and web technologies get a look-in too), and mathematical modelling. Check out my pages for details!