I was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware about 20 miles south of Philadelphia. I attended The Ohio State University as an undergraduate, and received a B.s. in physics. While at Ohio State, I worked in John Wilkins's group writing visualization software that could be integrated with their materials simulator. Here I also got my first taste of teaching while working in the math tutor room.
After graduating from Ohio State in 2003 I moved to Amherst, MA to attend graduate school at the University of Massachusetts. There I worked with Bob Hallock performing experiments searching for superfluidity in Solid Helium-4 (a so-called supersolid). These experiments may be the only observation to date of a supersolid in helium-4 (see this and this). I received my Ph.D. in 2011, and worked for a year in Richard Packard's lab at UC Berkeley working on superfluid weak links, and SHeQuIDs, which are the liquid helium analog of a SQuID.
After that I worked as a Post Doctoral researcher in David Hall's lab at Amherst College where I perform experiments on Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC). Specifically, there, my research focused on studies of small clusters of quantized vortex lines--their formation and dynamics--and unique topological structures in spinor condensates. The culmination of the latter resulted in the observation of Dirac monopoles in a synthetic magnetic field produced in the condensate.
Currently I am the Principle Ivestigator at the Sacramento State Low Temperature Laboratory. My research here is focussing on building high resolution sensor technology and using it to continue my study of liquid and solid helium-4.
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