Research Assistant
CurrentDissertation, October 2021 - Present. Responsible for assisting with the development of a new characterization technique to probe the mutual influence of membranes and membrane proteins on each other. This provides insights into how membrane composition contributes to the regulation of protein function and how proteins can control aspects of membrane structure. Proteins were embedded within an oriented phospholipid bilayer supported on an atomically flat substrate. Membrane structure is characterized via x-ray specular reflectivity (XRR) while protein conformation was simultaneously measured using standing wave x-ray fluorescence (SWXF) from fluorescently tagged amino acid groups within the protein.Topics in Beam Physics, January 2021 – June 2021. Contributed to the creation of the method for constructing a nonlinear accelerator lattice with the goal of connecting the integrator of a Hamiltonian in normalized coordinates to a real lens arrangement.The Science of Cities, May 2020 – January 2021. Studied the relationship between geometric factors of cities and the urban heat island effect. Modeled cities and weather patterns using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF), Python and Jupyter notebooks. Data visualization with matplotlib, cartopy.Quantum Field Theory, September 2018 – April 2020. Studied higher-order loop calculations. Research involved computing general 2-loop vacuum integrals with complex squared propagator masses. Leveraged Mathematica for analysis and computation.