About Me
I’ve long been a science “enthusiast” but began my physics career only recently. My professional background is as a freelance copyeditor, and for much of my young adulthood I was satisfied being a physics hobbyist. However, in the fall of 2015, while listening to Sean Carroll’s Great Courses lecture on the Higgs boson, I was struck with the firm conviction that I was really missing out by not being a professional physicist. That fall I enrolled at the University of New Hampshire for the ’16/’17 academic year to complete the physics degree I had begun eight years earlier at the University of Utah. In 2020 I moved to Seattle and began my PhD studies at the University of Washington. I spent three enriching and challenging years at the Center for Experimental Nuclear and Particle Astrophics at UW, where I worked on the DAMIC "DArk Matter in CCDs" experiment under the mentorship of my research advisor, Alvaro Chavarria. In early 2023 I made the extremely difficult decision to leave my PhD program with a Master's degree and move to Utah to be closer to family.