Originally from the southern Colorado town of Pueblo, I attended the Colorado School of Mines and graduated in 2006 with a B.S. in Engineering Physics and minor in Math/Computer Science.
I received my Ph. D. from Stony Brook University in 2011 in particle physics using data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN.
After graduating, I joined the ATLAS group at the Universität Mainz as a Postdoctoral Researcher working on numerous data analyses, detector operations and upgrades. In 2014, I moved to the University of California Santa Cruz where I joined the Fermi-LAT collaboration. Thus started my work in the exciting world of gamma-ray astrophysics!
I became a research scientist at the University of Maryland working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 2017 and in 2018 I was hired as a Civil Servant Scientist at GSFC.
I'm interested in dark matter searches, searches for new physics and all the astrophysics one must understand before discovering something new.
I am currently the PI of AstroPix: Silicon Pixel detectors in space and a mission concept submitted in the 2021 MIDEX Announcement of Opportunity, AMEGO-X; the Swift Observatory Project scientist and the ComPair balloon project manager.