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 eight 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). Equipped with a highly sensitive ~1000-element bolometer array operating at 95, 150, and 220 GHz, the SPT is capable of mapping the arcminute-scale anisotropy of the CMB to exquisite precision. The first goal of the SPT is to use 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.

In 2008, the SPT team reported the first successful use of SZ observations to find previously unknown clusters. More recently, the team has 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.

In the eight 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); and now I am one of the leaders of the data analysis effort.