I am currently an Professor in the Astronomy Department specializing in cosmology, radio astronomy, and radio instrumentation.
I received an A.S. from Colorado Northwestern Community College in 1998 while in high school, and a B.A. from Harvard in 2002 in physics and mathematics working with Paul Horowitz. I worked as a development engineer at the Space Sciences Laboratory from 2002 to 2004 with Dan Werthimer. I received my Ph.D. in 2009 from UC Berkeley working with Don Backer, spending the years from 2007 to 2009 as a predoctoral researcher at Arecibo Observatory. I spent two years as an NSF postdoctoral fellow and honorary Charles Townes fellow at UC Berkeley before joining the faculty at Berkeley in 2011.
I received an NSF CAREER award in 2014 and was recognized with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2019. Since 2020 I have served as the Faculty Director of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory (RAL). I am the Principal Investigator of the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) and a co-founder of the Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER).
In 2025, I published the sci-fi novel Coherence.
Specialty Areas: cosmology, radio astronomy, instrumentation, cosmic reionization, signal processing, machine learning
Projects
- Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA)
(Principal Investigator)
HERA is a 350-dish interfometer deployed in the Karoo Radio Reserve in South Africa. It observes the radio spectrum between 50 and 250 MHz to characterize the Cosmic Dawn of the universe by measuring the patchiness of highly red-shifted intergalactic hydrogen emission.
- The Electromagnetically Isolated Global Signal Estimation Platform (EIGSEP)
(Principal Investigator)
EIGSEP is a robotic platform that leverages the electromagnetic isolation of a remote canyon in Utah to study the Epoch of Reionization through the spatial monopole of the 21cm brightness temperature of neutral hydrogen (i.e. the ''global signal").
- The Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER)
(co-PI)
For nearly two decades, CASPER has led the development of open-source hardware and signal processing libraries, particularly involving Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), to advance state-of-the-art radio astronomy instrumentation.
