Research as an Undergraduate

I received my B.S. at the University of Washington in Physics and in Astronomy in 2009. At UW with Astronomy Professor Zeljko Ivezic, I used Principal Component Analysis on ~100,000 spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to analyze correlations of eigencoefficients with metallicity and gravity estimated by the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (SEGUE) Stellar Parameters Pipeline. The SDSS stellar spectroscopic database and the PCA results offer a convenient method to classify new spectra, to search for unusual spectra, to train various spectral classification methods, and to synthesize accurate colors in arbitrary optical bandpasses. You can read my paper here.

Also while at UW, I reduced cataclysmic variable spectra with Professor Paula Szkody and I searched for variable stars with Dr. Anjum Mukadam. During the summers while I was an undergraduate, I did three internships across the nation: the first at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) in Rosman, North Carolina; the second at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona; and the third at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.