From birth until leaving for college, I lived in northern Virginia, just outside Washington D.C., where I volunteered and interned at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. I first volunteered at the Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport, where I presented to thousands of visitors over the course of 3-4 years - my favorite was the “Touch a Falling Star” demonstration where visitors got to touch meteorite samples. I later interned at the D.C. Air & Space where I developed two new presentations on supernovae and laser inteferometry, conducted research on martian topography with Jim Zimbelman at the Center for Earth & Planetary Studies, and contributed to the events of the Apollo 11 50th anniversary, one of the largest in the museum’s history.

I then attended Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, where I had the good fortune to work with Prof. Rogier Windhorst and Dr. Rolf Jansen. Under their tutelage I worked on a number of projects culminating in my honors thesis on AGN detections with the Very Large Array (VLA) in the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) North Ecliptic Pole Time Domain Field (NEP TDF). At the same time I led Prof. Windhorst’s group’s outreach efforts at a number of events both at ASU and in the Tempe/Phoenix community, including a number of online events during the worst of the COVID pandemic. One such event was co-hosting a public launch party for JWST. I also published my first first-author paper with Prof. Windhorst in the first edition of the Astronomy Education Journal on work I did using the tool AHaH: Appreciating Hubble at Hyper-speed, in the classroom. In the course of this work I developed and implemented several lesson plans for the non-major astronomy labs at the university. I graduated summa cum laude from ASU with a double major in Astrophysics and Physics, and a minor in French.

I now live and work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a doctoral candidate, advised by Prof. Xin Liu. My doctoral work focuses on how supermassive black holes (SMBHs) reach their enormous size, specifically through the stages of binary AGN and other AGN accretion, such as nuclear tidal disruption events (TDEs). I served as outreach chair for the UIUC Astronomy Department from my arrival in 2022 to 2024, where I oversaw the return of significant outreach programs which had been inactive since the start of the pandemic, major new programs for the 2024 eclipse serving thousands of people, and the development of long-term metrics for the success of the outreach committee. Since the end of my term as chair I have continued to lead programs at the Urbana Free Library and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.