Reading fundamental physics
in the structure of the cosmos.

The distribution of galaxies carries information about gravity, cosmic expansion, and the initial conditions of the Universe—but extracting it requires precise control of nonlinear evolution, galaxy bias, and redshift-space distortions.

I develop perturbative descriptions and statistical observables for galaxy clustering, with an emphasis on connecting analytic theory to simulations and survey measurements. This work ranges from baryon-acoustic-oscillation modeling to the power spectrum, bispectrum, and modern descriptions of biased tracers.

Cosmological surveys observe photons on the past light cone, not density fields on a preferred time slice. I work on formulating galaxy clustering and other large-scale observables in a fully relativistic and operational way, including the effects of clocks, rulers, projection, and local tides.

A related theme is the search for fossil signatures: correlations imprinted by primordial long-wavelength scalar or tensor perturbations. These observables offer ways to test inflation, additional fields, and gravity on scales inaccessible to conventional correlation functions.

The largest structures in the Universe began as microscopic fluctuations. Their statistics can reveal the mechanism of inflation and physics at energies far beyond terrestrial experiments. I study primordial non-Gaussianity, inflationary relics, and the evolution of perturbations from the earliest epochs to observable structure.

I am also interested in the cosmic microwave background beyond its temperature anisotropies—including spectral distortions and polarization—as a probe of small-scale primordial power, gravitational waves, and possible Planck-scale modifications of early-Universe dynamics.

Large spectroscopic surveys turn cosmological theory into a measurement. I am a member of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX), an untargeted integral-field survey designed to map the three-dimensional distribution of high-redshift Lyman-alpha emitters and measure cosmic expansion at an early epoch.

My work with survey data includes clustering estimators, contamination and selection effects, intensity mapping, source catalogs, and cosmological interpretation. The same framework now extends to the exceptionally dense low-redshift [O II] sample contained in the first HETDEX public data release.

Gravitational waves provide a new way to test the dark sector. I study compact objects with masses or internal physics that differ from ordinary stellar remnants, asking how their formation, dynamics, and waveforms can reveal—or constrain—new forms of matter.

This program includes sub-solar-mass black holes, dissipative atomic dark matter, dark molecular chemistry, and white-dwarf–compact-object binaries. It connects microscopic models to astrophysical populations and to present and future detectors across terrestrial, space-based, and decihertz frequency bands.

Modern cosmology requires calculations that are both accurate and fast enough to confront large data sets. I develop numerical and semi-analytic tools for projected correlation functions, perturbative fields, mock catalogs, and higher-order statistics.

More recently, I have explored machine-learning approaches that reconstruct the cosmic web and hidden large-scale flows from incomplete observations. The goal is not to replace physical modeling, but to combine simulations, algorithms, and interpretable structure to recover information that conventional estimators leave unused.