I am currently a researcher working with Prof. Claudio Campagnari at UCSB. My research consists of analyzing data from the CMS detector at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Our group focuses both Standard Model (SM) and physics beyond the SM (BSM) searches in the dileptonic channel. My doctoral dissertation, which I defended in February 2011, focused on the measurement of the production cross-section of top anti-top quark pairs ("ttbar", in physics parlance) in the dileptonic channel with the first 3.1 pb^-1 of proton-proton collision data at √s=7 TeV. It was the first measurement of its kind at the LHC.

In what feels like a previous life, I contributed to the construction, testing and commissioning of the CMS silicon strip tracker (the beautiful image above is that of a sub-detector of the silicon strip tracker, the Tracker Inner Barrel) both at UCSB and at CERN. UCSB built and tested the largest fraction of the strip tracker of all involved institutes.

As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, I worked on the ATLAS Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT) and was on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) experiment. I was involved with testing and fixing ATLAS and SNO electronics under the supervision of Rick van Berg, an engineer with the high energy physics (HEP) instrumentation group. I also studied high energy cosmic ray muons using SNO data under the supervision of Eugene Beier, a study that turned into my senior year independent study.