Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2012

Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, Riverside

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My research focuses on weak lensing, particularly weak lensing around galaxy clusters.

Weak lensing is a type of gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing describes the way images of galaxies are distorted by the mass between that galaxy and the observer (us). Galaxies appear to have many different shapes, both because they're very different intrinsically and because we see them at all different angles. In the weak lensing regime, the distortions caused by lensing are a lot smaller than those typical differences, so we have to average the shapes of many galaxies to tell that they've been distorted at all. But if we can do that properly, we can learn all sorts of things about the mass between those galaxies and us.