Research Overview


The most concise summary of my research is that I measure mass in GeV and distance in megaparsecs.

My research covers many different aspects of astroparticle physics phenomenology, though there are two main themes I have recently been pursuing:

1) What can astrophysics tell us about the particle nature of dark matter? and

2) What is the nature of high-energy neutrinos seen at IceCube, and what can they tell us about new physics?

Below, you’ll find some software I developed as part of these interests: Captn’General computes the capture rate (and heat transport) of dark matter in stars, which can potentially have large observable effects over their many-billion year lifetimes. Depending on the nature of the DM, this can provide constraints stronger than the best direct detection limits,  or even help solve the long-standing Solar Composition Problem.

nuFATE is a small but nifty (and growing) program to calculate the attenuation of high-energy neutrinos as they traverse the Earth on their way to the newest generations of cubic-km detectors.

I am also interested in statistical techniques that can help us make sense of the very large amount of particle and astronomy data, and the ever-increasing parameter space of possible extensions of the standard model. I am a member of the GAMBIT global fitting collaboration, which is both an intrepid group of parameter space explorers – and a great piece of open source physics software.

Code/software that I wrote or am involved with Dark matter and statistics