My Projects

I'm working on a number of projects, both personal and professional.

Northeastern University

Toric Calabi-Yau Manifolds

My graduate work at Northeastern focused on Calabi-Yau threefolds that can be constructed from four-dimensional reflexive lattice polytopes. The 4d reflexive polytopes were completely classified by Kreuzer and Skarke, and Batyrev showed that each fine, regular, star triangulation of one of these polytopes can be used to construct a Calabi-Yau threefold which is realized as a hypersurface in a multiply weighted projective space. My collaborator Ross Altman constructed the ToricCY database, which contains explicit constructions of all unique threefolds for a subset of these polytopes. I worked on projects that examined various properties of both the Kreuzer-Skarke and ToricCY databases. These projects included exploring vacuum selection using a network model, constructing a systematic method for identifying and classifying all orientifold planes under a certain type of Z2 involution, and using machine learning to estimate the number of fine, regular, star triangulations of a given polytope.

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

AAS WorldWide Telescope

I'm on the development team for AAS WorldWide Telescope (WWT), which is a free and open-source software suite for astronomy and data visualization. WWT comes in a number of forms, including a Windows client, an interactive web app, a research app for astronomy professionals, toolkits for Python and TypeScript, and embeddable iframes.

I've worked on a number of aspects of the WWT ecosystem, but one of the coolest visualizations I've helped make is this interactive below, which lets you see the first batch of images from JWST in context on the sky

If you're interested in the moon, here's a custom view I made for International Observe the Moon Night.

glue

I'm also on the development team for glue, an open-source Python package that's great for interactive data analysis. Glue allows users to flexibly link related datasets within its framework, view the same data in different ways in multiple types of viewers, and make subset selections that propagate automatically across all viewers. I've worked on the core glue package, as well as many of the various plugins that have been created to extend glue's functionality, such as a WWT viewer and a Plotly exporter.

Cosmic Data Stories

I'm also on the development team for Cosmic Data Stories, a NASA-funded project that aims to teach data science to students using astronomy. We're currently in the middle of building our first data story, which focuses on Hubble's Law.

The frontend for CosmicDS is built using the Vuetify framework, using ipyvuetify to connect widgets to our Python backend. Students can manipulate their data using viewers from glueviz, and in particular glue's Jupyter front-end glupyter.

Personal Projects

D&D Spellbook 5e

I created a mobile application for looking up properties of D&D 5e spells while playing. The app allows keeping various spell lists for multiple characters, as well as filtering and sorting by a variety of different fields. The app is available on both Google Play and the App Store. I typically release updates on Android first, but try to keep the time between corresponding updates to a minimum.