Outreach

Theoretical astrophysics has essentially no direct applications. I’m only doing it because of the joy of learning how the space works. Because of this, I think of my job as fun-fact mining: I discover cool things about our universe and share them with people. I want to awe people and make them proud of the humanity that they are a part of.

Outreach is important to me. I feel like my work lacks meaning if it is only fully appreciated by a single-digit number of experts in the entire world. I like the experience of taking complicated-sounding topics, brushing off the jargon, and explaining them in ways that anyone can understand. I want people to feel like science is a real thing they can understand, no matter how old or young they are, no matter how they look, and no matter how much they hated math in school.

  • Great Orion Dark Sky Festival 2025, Panamint Valley
  • Dark Valley Dark Sky Festival 2024
  • Engineering 4 Kids Day 2019
  • Thousand Oaks Elementary School Science Fair 2018
  • Bay Area Science Festival 2017

Public presentation resources

Below is a collection of recordings, slides, and notes from various public outreach presentations I have given over the years.

  • my “PhD offense” describing my PhD work, recording
  • Pasadena High School (PHS) Astronomy Club (2025), slides
  • Pasadena Astronomy on Tap, Starquakes and stellar surprises (August 2024), recording, slides
  • Pasadena City College (PCC) Astronomy Club (2024), slides
  • Rainstorm (high-school level)
    • Five Paths through Physics: on starting a career in physics, slides (with David Abramovitch, Charlie Cummings, Erika Hathaway, Hannah Manetsch)
    • Apples to Orbits: on general relativity, recording (with Sarah Habib, Isaac Legred)
    • The Art of Guessing: on solving Fermi problems, slides (with Erika Hathaway, Yonna Kim)
  • Splash at Berkeley (high-school level)
    • Mostly Complex: on complex numbers, notes
    • Why Quantum?: on quantum mechanics, notes (with Arani Acharya)
    • Spacetime: on special and general relativity, notes (with Arani Acharya)
  • Physics Unlimited
  • Northwestern “Astronomer Evening” celebrating the 50th Apollo 11 Anniversary
    • slides about the distance to the Moon
    • slides about the far side of the Moon
    • slides about the Galilean moons of Jupiter
    • slides about Saturn’s moon Titan
    • slides about future prospects for space exploration

Successful fellowship applications

Applying for graduate school and postdoctoral positions is very daunting, and it can be hard to tell exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. Below are my successful GRFP (graduate) and NHFP (postdoctoral) applications. I modeled my other applications during these seasons on these.

UCB Society of Physics Students

Science is itself a culture that is a big part of many people’s lives. Community is important.

When I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I was an officer of our chapter of the Society of Physics Students (SPS). SPS serves as a welcoming community of physics and physics-adjacent majors and other physics enthusiasts. Below are some chapter reports describing what we accomplished.