I’m currently a PhD student at the University of Colorado and aspiring to become an instructor at the undergraduate level. I completed my bachelor studies at the University of Washington in June 2007. I was awarded a Bachelor of Science in Astronomy with a minor in Mathematics and a Bachelor of Science in Physics. I graduated Magna Cum Laude with both Departmental and College Honors. As of August 2007, I have been at University of Colorado at Boulder working on my dissertation. I spent my first year as a teaching assistant for one of the University's introductory astronomy courses and during the summer of 2010 I was an instructor for ASTR 1120, “Stars and Galaxies”. In May 2009, I was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Presently, I work under the general umbrella of computational astrophysics, but have been focused on various studies to understand the chemical evolution of the universe. My earlier work involved simulations of the interaction between reverse shocks in supernova remnants the dust-rich ejecta generated by the supernova explosion. The goals of these efforts were to understand the amount of dust destruction that may take place during such interactions and answer the question, are supernova the primary dust factories in the high redshift universe? Recently, I have been working to implement non-equilibrium ionization chemistry for metal species in the open-source hydrodynamics code
Enzo. In addition to research, I am dedicated to becoming an effective STEM educator and committed to STEM outreach. My most significant outreach effort has been founding and running
CU-STARS.