About Me:
I'm a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. at the University of Chicago. For the past 10 years, I have worked on a single project: The 10-meter South Pole Telescope (SPT). The SPT is a millimeter-wave telescope designed to make sensitive measurements of diffuse, low-contrast emission, such as anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The first camera on the SPT was equipped with a highly sensitive, kilo-pixel bolometer array capable of mapping the arcminute-scale anisotropy of the CMB to exquisite precision. The primary goal of this camera was to survey 2500 square degrees of the southern sky, using the CMB as a backlight to discover distant, massive clusters of galaxies through their interaction with the CMB, known as the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect. The full survey was completed in late 2011. In January, 2012, a new polarization-sensitive receiver was installed on the telescope. One year of data has been collected with this receiver, and it is anticipated that this data will lead to the first ever detection of B-mode polarization in the CMB.

SPT data has led to numerous breakthrough publications. In 2008, the SPT team reported the first successful use of SZ observations to find previously unknown clusters. Using only 10% of the survey data, the team also published the first cosmological constraints from an SZ-selected sample of clusters, the first detection of the SZ power spectrum, the first millimeter-wave detection of fluctuations in the cosmic infrared background, and the discovery of a new family of high-redshift star-forming galaxies. More recently, the team has made the highest signal-to-noise measurement of the gravitational lensing of the CMB and used that measurement to constrain the clustering bias of galaxies, and the team has used the full 2500 square-degree survey data to make the most sensitive measurement yet of the damping tail of the primary CMB power spectrum.

In the nearly 10 years I have worked on this project, I have particpated in the design of the telescope, optics, and receiver; I have designed and built a protoype SPT receiver (which was used to qualify the secondary mirror and cold optics box); I have traveled to the South Pole with four other team members to assemble the primary reflector, and now I am one of the leaders of the data analysis effort.