Research Interests
My current research interests lie broadly within gravitational lensing and its applications to cosmology, which is the topic of my PhD dissertation. This includes investigations of intrinsic galaxy alignment in 2- and 3-point correlations of galaxy ellipticity and the development of techniques to indirectly measure the intrinsic alignment signal in order to reduce or remove its impact as a contaminant to cosmological information. These 'self-calibration' techniques also allow us to use the isolated intrinsic alignment signal for constraining models of intrinsic alignment and structure formation in the universe.
I have also worked on more general cosmological problems, including investigations of exact, inhomogeneous solutions to Einstein's field equations in the form of the Szekeres metric. For example, I have investigated the ability of the Szekeres metric to fit the observed growth of structure in the universe. In the past I also worked with supernovae, an important cosmological probe of the expansion of the universe. I modeled type Ia and Ic supernovae spectra, exploring conditions in the explosion by comparison to observations. One result of this work by the Supernovae group at OU was the development of a scheme to define four subclasses of type Ia supernovae, which has recently been updated by other groups for much larger type Ia samples.