About

Hi there! I am a space physicist working at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow.

My diverse research interests are to advance our understanding of the ionosphere, inner magnetosphere, and magnetotail environments. My work leverages innovative data analysis techniques across a wide range of in-situ and remote sensing observatories to study the magnetosphere as a coupled system. Currently my two main science goals are:

  1. Understand the mechanisms that are responsible for plasma sheet electron acceleration to relativistic energies, and their subsequent scattering into Earth’s atmosphere, and
  2. Understand the mechanisms and impacts of relativistic particle precipitation in Earth’s inner magnetosphere.

At the lower energy end, this precipitation creates beautiful displays of the aurora near the northern and southern poles. At the higher energy end, however, these particles emit X-rays that can be hazardous to humans and to our technological presence in space and upper atmosphere (think aviation and above).

Beyond my data analysis pursuits, developing the asilib python library where I’ve learned to use Software Engineering best practices in analyzing auroral all-sky imager (ASI) data. I also lead the Loss through Auroral Microburst Pulsations mission (LAMPsat)—a CubeSat mission concept to simultaneously image pulsating aurora together with the relativistic electrons, to test the Miyoshi+2020 hypothesis that relativistic microbursts are the high energy tail of the pulsating aurora phenomenon.

Want to learn more? Head on over to the Publications section to read more about my scientific work, or the Research section to see movies of the aurora.

Exercise and data analysis

On the topic of data analysis, here is a global heatmap showing where I’ve explored.

Interactive Heatmap

This program was used to generate this map.

Running personal records (PRs)

DistanceRaceTime
1 mileHigh School Track00:05:21
5k2017 AGU Fall Meeting00:19:20
10k2019 Run To The Pub00:40:50
Half-marathon2018 Run To The Pub01:30:25
Marathon2017 Bozeman Marathon03:30:32