During my first 18 years, I lived in a small town
in rural
Pennsylvania, which hosted a diverse community of Amish, farmers,
students, and conservatives. Luckily, I left the state to
attend Wellesley College in MA, where I majored in physics and
mathematics. I divided my time there between my studies, playing the
French horn, and getting off campus. I spent a year abroad at Oxford
University, which was quite enjoyable when it was not raining. I
also began to learn belly dancing. When I returned, I founded a
belly dancing society and completed a senior thesis in which I
simulated electrorheological fluids in a shear flow. This research
motivated my interest in computational applications of physics. To escape the glacial winters of the northeast and to seek a more
liberal political sanctuary, I began graduate school in physics at
U.C. Berkeley in 2003. I now make my home in the astronomy department,
where I perform parallel self-gravitating, radiation-hydrodynamics
simulations that happen to make lovely webpage backgrounds.
While my code is running, I belly dance in Suhaila Salimpour's
Repetoire Ensemble. 