I am currently a pursuing a doctoral degree in Condensed Matter Physics (CMP) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK).

I started as a graduate teaching assistant where I lead laboratory experiments, tutored students one-on-one, gave lectures, and graded lab reports/homework. I am currently a graduate research assistant focusing on theoretical/computational modeling of material data gathered via neutron scattering experiments. 

In my first semester, I was the vice president of the Graduate Physics Society (GPS), which provides professional development, social outreach, mentoring, and a voice to our departments graduate students. By the second semester, I was the president of GPS. At the end of my third year, I reached my term limit as a GPS board member and began to fully focus on my research. 

I perform research under the supervision of my advisor, Dr. David Alan Tennant. I'm more than thrilled to be a part of a group that is simultaneously within experimental, computational, and theoretical physics. The group philosophy is "data-driven", due to the fact that we work with large 4-dimensional data sets. 

In my free-time, I make electronic music and enjoy reading about recent discoveries in the fields of CMP, Quantum Materials, as well as Quantum Information. 

My main areas of interest include strongly-correlated electrons, cuprate superconductors, transition metal dichalcogenides, topological insulators, quantum information theory, and spin-liquid crystals. 

I place an emphasis on the theoretical modeling that describes unique phases of matter using High-Performance Computing (HPC) methods, alongside analytic methods.  Further, I've found that empirical modeling has become more important to me as I've progressed throughout my program. It is important to me that there is direct communication between theorists and experimentalists, which is why my research interests include using HPC methods to study condensed matter systems, guided by experimental data. 

Using HPC methods to study toy-models describing physical systems allows theorists to work closely with experimental physicists to confirm real-world data with numerical predictive data in real-time, bridging the gap between analytic theory and experimental results. As researchers move towards a "data-driven" framework, I hope to see theory and experiment merge back into one complete study, relying on verifiable observation.

My first project involved analyzing inelastic neutron data using ORNL's ARCS beamline to investigate a previously unknown ordered phase of Ice-Ih. We used the molecular vibrations of deuterated Ice-Ih to investigate the convetionally disordered hydrogen structure within the hexagonally ordered oxygen lattice. Our publication is under review, but can be found on ArXiV. 

My second project studied the unconventional superconductor (SCCO). This compound is a uniquely sophisticated crystal, as it is intrinsically hole-doped, leading to uncommon phases such as the hole crystal phase. Using both elastic and inelastic neutron scattering measurements, we measured an atypical molecular vibrational mode. We found a direct relationship between the complex crystal structure's deformations and calcium doping by virtue of an exotic phonon mode. The paper(s) are currently in-the-works and will be linked here when finished.