Work and Experience

Undergraduate Research Assistant - Celestial and Spaceflight Mechanics Laboratory (June 2025 - Present)

For the summer following my third year of undergraduate studies, I decided to turn down an offer from the NASA Planetary Magnetospheres Lab and instead further pursue my interests in mathematical and computational modeling with the Celestial and Spaceflight Mechanics Laboratory under the mentorship of Dr. Daniel Scheeres. In this position, I am developing methods for reliably integrating N-body mechanics (used here to model mutual gravitational attraction) with granular mechanics (used here to model contact dynamics) to better understand the dynamics of systems of asteroids. Specifically, I am interested in researching angular momentum and energy transfer when an asteroid is ejected from a cluster, along with the frequency of such an event. This work is heavily focused on numerical computation, with knowledge of both numerical analysis (e.g., understanding integration schemes and their convergence properties, working with parallelization, etc.) and astrophysical processes.

Undergraduate Research Assistant - Lightning, Atmosphere, Ionosphere, and Radiation Belt Research Group (August 2024 - May 2025)

As part of the CU Boulder Discovery Learning Apprenticeship (DLA) Program, I worked under Dr. Robert Marshall and Ph.D. student Paraksh Vankawala at the LAIR Lab on detecting and analyzing plasma waves (specifically, EMIC waves) in the Earth's magnetosphere using Van Allen Probe data. During this work, I was exposed to a number of topics with which I had no prior experience, including space and plasma physics, machine learning, and scientific data analysis. I was responsible for finding a consistent and reliable method to visualize the waves, annotating and training a model to detect them, and performing analysis on the waves that I was able to find.

Omitron Internship - NASA CARA (May 2024 - Present)

I returned to Omitron for a second summer, this time in a research position on the CARA (Conjunction Assessment and Risk Analysis) team. Since I was a returning intern, I had the opportunity to felve much more deeply into more complex topics than I was able to during my previous summer; during my work, I was exposed to advanced concepts in conjunction assessment, such as covariance estimation and propagation, covariance realism, multivariate statistical analysis, and multidimensional data visualization. The majority of my work was on a research project building on the work I did at the end of my previous internship, this time focusing on comparing three methods for visualizing near-Earth satellite conjunctions and their utility for different conjunction geometries; as a part of this research, I both developed a visualization program and wrote a 20-page paper on my work and findings.

Omitron Internship - NASA CARA (June 2023 - August 2023)

I was an analysis intern for Omitron, a NASA contractor, on the CARA (Conjunction Assessment and Risk Analysis) program. For the first portion of my internship, I primarily worked on updating and developing unit tests for various routines in the CARA SDK, as well as improving the safety and robustness of some of these routines. These included both simple library functions and more complicated, in-depth research-driven code, such as the code used to calculate probability of collision (Pc) using various semi-analytical and numerical methods. During the final three weeks (approximately) of my internship, I was put to the task of developing my own tool from scratch.