Research

My primary interest is in quantum gravity and high energy theory research. Some of the projects I’ve worked on are below.

Higher-Derivative Gravity Action with Conformally Coupled Matter

I’m currently working on a project involving the study of higher-derivative gravitational actions near black holes by supplementing them with conformally coupled scalar field terms.

Extremal Black Hole Spectroscopy and AdS/CFT

When I was an undergraduate student, I spent two semesters at the University of Michigan doing research on extremal black holes in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. The goal was to study the spectra of allowed states near the horizons of different types of extremal black holes (e.g. Reissner-Nordstrom black holes vs. Kerr black holes), identifying universal modes.

Quadratic Differentials and Closed String Field Theory

During the summer before graduate school, I worked on a project which made use of string field theory techniques to study natural networks such as brains and tree networks. The idea is that networks are typically considered to form so as to minimize total path length, but a more accurate picture may be that physical networks are in fact minimizing their surface areas for given volume, as the edges are not truly 1-dimensional. This problem of studying minimization of surface area for shapes of varying genus has been studied by physicists before: it’s string theory!

Exploration of the Non-Abelian Dirac-Born-Infeld Action

When I was an undergraduate student, I worked alongside a professor to conduct an informal investigation of the non-Abelian Dirac-Born-Infeld action in string theory. We reviewed some of the literature and made a few calculations, but did not conduct active research.