Its been more than 2 years since my last post (barely). First year was a blur of problem sets, late nights, little sleep, and trying to keep up with research commitments and software carpentry maintenance that took almost all I had to get through. Second year I devoted myself to recovery and quantum mechanics, slowly disentangling myself from prior commitments to allow me to look towards a future of research at UC Davis. This year I’m looking forward to getting started on my thesis and starting to engage the world outside of the UC Davis physics department.
Highlights from the last 2+ years:
Finished general physics classes
Passed the prelim exam
Chose Stefano Valenti as my thesis advisor
Chose a thesis topic: doubling the number of identified supernova progenitors using methods other than direct detection
Organized the AAS Software Carpentry Workshop (and taught at it) for 2016 and 2017
Started a group in the physics department that meets weekly to discuss all things coding
Investigated whether precipitable water vapor measurements from GPS stations could be combined with atmospheric models to correct sky lines in ground based spectroscopy
Investigated whether the UV source we observed near the progenitor of SN 1993J is in fact the companion to the progenitor
Investigated the universality of extinction laws using 10 different long slit observations of different environments in the star cluster 30 Doradus
Learned ground based spectroscopic data reduction by reducing many nights of observations (taken over the course of a year) of ASASSN-15oz. Stay tuned for some very interesting results!
