Research Interests
I'm a radio astronomer, but I also have extensive experience with optical astronomy and dabble in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum too. I'm Project Scientist for the Breakthrough Listen project - humanity's largest and most comprensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). I'm also the Director of Undergraduate Research for Breakthrough Listen. In that role I'm involved with supervision of student projects in Oxford, and I'm also the Principal Investigator on our US National Science Foundation Funded Research Experience for Undergraduates program at the University of California, Berkeley.
I wear a number of hats with Breakthrough Listen, including running our program on the world's largest steerable single dish radio telescope: the Green Bank Telescope. We've collected petabytes of data with GBT which we analyze with cutting-edge digital signal processing pipelines, including machine learning. I've also worked on optical SETI projects including searches for anomalies in time series data, and in large online catalogs. I'm particularly excited about the potential for the upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory to find unusual objects, which could be indicators of interesting astrophysics, or potential technosignatures (indicators of non-human technology).
I'm passionate about astronomy education and communication - I've run public lecture series, after school science programs (including launching a number of high altitude balloons), written popular science articles and educational materials, and given frequent public talks.