Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1995

Senior Research Associate & Lecturer, Astronomy Department, Cornell University

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I'm scientifically omnivorous; my research and teaching are interdisciplinary, mostly spanning astronomy, physics, and statistics. My research is largely in the emerging field of astrostatistics. My current teaching and advising activities are largely in statistics, bringing me in contact with data science problems in diverse areas.

In my main field of astrophysics, I like to work on the boundary of observation and theory, combining careful statistical data analysis with astrophysical theory to test models of astronomical phenomena, particularly in the areas of high energy astrophysics (supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, black holes, neutron stars), exoplanets, cosmology, and solar system astronomy. My work focuses on problems that can benefit from development of new statistical methodology, and largely adopts the Bayesian approach to statistics, which uses probability theory as a kind of calculus for inductive inference (in contrast to more conventional frequentist approach, which uses probability to describe variability in repeated experimentation). I'm particularly interested in problems where these two statistical approaches produce different results.