NASA AWE Mission Experience
I wrote software for Utah State University on the NASA AWE Mission for two years. Working directly under the mission PI Mike Taylor (and later Ludger Scherliess), I developed internal tooling to process and store PostGIS representations of satellite data and facilitate data transfer between USU and NASA servers. I was also partially responsible for server maintenance and administration.
Physics Educated
In May 2025, I obtained a bachelor's degree in physics, with minors in mathematics and computer science. I took all available standard courses, including classical mechanics, electrostatics and electrodynamics, thermodynamics, two semesters of quantum mechanics, as well as several courses in the lab. While these taught me plenty about physics, they also gave me strong critical thinking and problem-solving skills that are applicable in many other industries.
Battle-Tested in Research
My senior research was on anomalies in the literature data for electron-phonon coupling in copper. By collecting as much historical data as possible, I was able to determine what should have been the best possible value for the strength of electron-phonon interactions. However, this was far below what experimental methods suggest. The physics is all there, which leads me to believe there is significant systematic error in the literature data.
Clear and Effective Communication
I taught introductory physics labs for life science majors for three years at Utah State, with several of my students switching into the physics program after taking the course. While on the AWE team, I performed mission outreach many times, including at the Kennedy Space Center leading up to the mission launch. For my research presentation at the 2025 USU Spring Research Symposium, I recieved "expert" marks in all categories, with one evaluator noting me as the best presenter of the year.A Passion for Great Software
When I was young, I was fascinated by the internet and obsessed with making websites; by the time I was in the fourth grade, I was building Yik-Yak clones on my dad's laptop, but I didn't know how to serve them over the internet.
Fast-forward to today, and I'm serving over a dozen services on this domain through my own server hardware. While making websites has taken a backseat (this was painful for me), I'm still very passionate about developing software, especially tools that are useful. Whether it be processing NASA data, writing a smart todo list, or even developing a tool to count the number of homework pages I wrote in college (over 2000), I love applying my skills to solve problems that matter to people.
I'm always looking forward to learning new things, and I'm excited to share my talents where they're needed.
