my work

💻 my work at GitHub

• I am currently a software engineer in GitHub’s data organization
• I use tools like Apache Airflow and Apache Spark for building data pipelines
• The languages I use the most are Python, SQL, and Scala.

⚛️ my physics work

Prior to working in the tech industry, I conducted research in theoretical nuclear/particle physics and computational nanotechnology. Open the tabs below for summaries of the various projects I worked on, with descriptions for both physicists and non-physicists. The corresponding publications can be viewed either on my INSPIRE page (for nuclear/particle-physics-related work) or on my Google Scholar page (for all the rest).

description for physicists

• T_cc⁺ decays (collaborators: L Dai, S Fleming, T Mehen)
  • Calculated the decay width of the exotic meson T_cc⁺ to NLO in an effective field theory, treating it as a molecular state of two D mesons, and considering interactions with pions and photons. The calculation was in excellent agreement with the spectra measured by LHCb, and the comparison of the calculated differential decay rates with data provided strong evidence for the interpretation of the T_cc⁺ as a bound state of D mesons.
• TMD J/ψ production (collaborators: M Copeland, S Fleming, R Gupta, T Mehen)
  • Derived polarized transverse-momentum-dependent (TMD) fragmentation functions for light quarks and gluons fragmenting to J/ψ by matching onto non-relativistic QCD (NRQCD), which can be compared to experiments at the future Electron-Ion Collider.
  • Compared J/ψ production in SIDIS via quark fragmentation and photon-gluon fusion, to identify kinematic regimes which could be used to extract poorly-constrained NRQCD long-distance matrix elements.
  • Calculated power corrections due to soft gluon radiation in J/ψ production, identifying new NRQCD operators that mediate the transition from a color-octet cc̅ pair to a color-singlet ³S₁ state.
• Invisibility of a metamaterial sphere (collaborators: M Durach, K Rosado-Ayala)
  • Demonstrated that a metamaterial microsphere consisting of concentric layers of gold and dielectric can be tuned to be invisible to light by varying the metal fraction.
  • Ported Mathematica notebooks to Fortran to enable parallelized computation on the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer.

description for non-physicists

Particles like protons and neutrons, which make up every atom's nucleus, are themselves composed of tinier particles called quarks, which are held together by gluons. The physical theory that describes quarks and gluons is called quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Predicting the results of experiments at particle colliders using QCD is extremely difficult. Instead, one can work with so-called effective field theories (EFTs), which are approximations to the "true" theory. In my research, my collaborators and I used various different EFTs for QCD to predict the results of experiments.

Prior to working in particle physics, I also wrote computer programs to model how extremely small, specially-designed materials behave when exposed to laser light.