About Me:
I'm a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Chicago and an Associate Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. For the past six 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. We have recently reported the first successful use of SZ observations to find previously unknown clusters. During the six 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.