Environmental Policy and Research

Over the last few years, I have grown increasingly interested and concerned in environmental issues. I believe that the threat of climate change is the most pressing problem facing the world today, and that it is therefore imperative to find sustainable and equitable solutions to these problems. While technology will certainly play a crucial role in enabling a less carbon intensive economy, I believe that a fundamental shift in our paradigms of growth and consumption must occur if we are truly to stave off the threat of climate change and its associated ills. To bring about this shift, policy makers will have to propose and implement bold strategies which must be informed by the best scientifc knowledge available.

My interests in this field encompass new technologies which will help us reduce our reliance on carbon intensive fuels, such as solar, wind, nuclear power, etc. as well as the implementation of policies which promote the use of these technologies. I am also interested in policies that are designed to better align environmental, social and economic interests.

I hope to transition from the field of High Energy Physics to the Environmental Policy and Research soon. In order to aid in this transition, I have been taking classes at the Bren School of Environmental Management at UCSB. For more information on my research experience and my interests, please my CV.

High Energy Physics



My research as a undergraduate and graduate student has focused on trying to explain the origins of matter. Fundamentally, I'm interested in why the Universe is the way it is and in searching for and explaining phenomena which does not fit into the framework of the Standard Model (SM) of Fundamental Physics. To aid in this quest, particle physicists have built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC is designed to collide protons head on at very high energies. Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, tells us that energy and mass are equivalent. We can therefore use the very high energies of the colliding protons to create heavier states of matter which are incompatible with the SM as it is formulated today. If these states do exist, we hope to be able to study the properties of these states in order to guide us towards a more complete model of nature.

To study the remnants of the collisions, we have built extremely precise and extremely large particle detectors. There are four such detectors at the LHC, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb. I have worked on both the ATLAS and CMS detectors. My role on the ATLAS detector was fairly limited. I was involved with testing electronics for the Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT) sub-detector. The TRT is designed to measure the momentum of charged particles. I was much more heavily involved with the CMS detector. On the hardware side, I helped to construct and commission the silicon strip tracker, which is also designed to measure the momentum of charged particles, but is a very different design from the TRT. Personally, I think working on particle detector hardware can be just as fun as analyzing data from the LHC. I am very interested in the development of new, innovative detector technologies and detector electronics.