Research

MOLECULAR DYNAMICS

I spent several years as a Research Associate at the Technical University of Munich where I investigated the practical effects of induce polarization in simulations of biological systems. I continued to develop a highly parallel implementation of the fast multipole method in the molecular dynamics package Polaris(MD), which allows for large simulations of biomolecules to be performed extremely efficiently.

2020. An optimizing symbolic algebra approach for generating fast multipole method operators
2016. Extrapolating Single Organic Ion Solvation Thermochemistry from Simulated Water Nanodroplets
2015. The fast multipole method and point dipole moment polarizable force fields

GRAVITATIONAL LENSING

Chance alignments in the sky of a massive object like a galaxy and a strong light source such as a quasar can produce spectacular lensing effects. Similar to candle light passing through a wine glass, the light from the quasar will be distorted by the curvature of space induced by the mass of the galaxy. Sometimes the same quasar will appear to be in several locations at once. This effect can be used to infer a range of properties about the galaxy and the Universe itself. In my work, I've shown how stars can be weighed and how the age of the Universe can be measured.

2021. The lens SW05 J143454.4+522850: a fossil group at redshift 0.6?
2021. Time delay lens modelling challenge
2021. The Hubble constant from eight time-delay galaxy lenses
2020. Lessons from a blind study of simulated lenses: image reconstructions do not always reproduce true convergence
2018. Models of gravitational lens candidates from Space Warps CFHTLS
2016. Light versus dark in strong-lens galaxies: dark matter haloes that are rounder than their stars
2015. Gravitational lens modelling in a citizen science context
2014. Cosmological parameter determination in free-form strong gravitational lens modelling
2014. Gravitational lens recovery with GLASS: measuring the mass profile and shape of a lens
2010. Weak microlensing
2008. A New Estimate of the Hubble Time with Improved Modeling of Gravitational Lenses
2008. COSMOGRAIL VII. Time delays and the Hubble constant from WFI J2033-4723
2006. The Hubble Time Inferred from 10 Time Delay Lenses

COMPUTER SCIENCE

Before moving to Zürich in 2005 to study physics, I studied Computer Science at RIT. My Master's thesis was on a graph theoretic topic called Folkman Numbers. A Folkman number is the least number of vertices required, such that no matter how you connect the edges, subject to some constraints, you will always be able to satisfy a particular property. What those constraints are and which properties you try to satisfy vary for each problem.

2005. Computing the Folkman Number Fv(2,2,3;4)