I've been involved with sPHENIX since roughly 2019, when I was a second-year grad student at MIT. At the time, I was at CERN working on building the detector control system for the ITS at ALICE, a modified form of which eventually became the detector control system for the MVTX as well.

What is the focus of your work on the sPHENIX experiment?

A large part of my work has been on the design and development of the software that controls MVTX operations, from low-level communication with the FELIX driver interface all the way up to the panels the shifters use to turn on the detector. I was also involved with planning many of the systems that keep the MVTX electronics safe (the PLC and the instrumentation on the cooling lines in particular), and I was responsible for selecting and implementing the database engines that store the MVTX detector settings and history. Most of the rest of my work has been on track reconstruction; my main contributions in this regard have been on TPC track seeding, particularly the cellular-automaton (CA) seeding algorithm itself and a propagator module that lengthens seeds found within the TPC. I've also spent some time more recently on multiplicity analyses involving the various tracking detectors, particularly the MVTX and INTT, especially in the capacity of analyses as vehicles to improve track reconstruction as a whole (for example, the development of tracklet-based alignment studies and data-driven evaluation of clustering algorithms). (Both Thomas and I, but especially Thomas, have also had significant involvement in the assembly of the inner HCal, though that's not the current focus of our work for either of us.)

Where were you born and what is your educational background before your current position?

I was born in and grew up in the Chicago area, just across the Indiana state border in Munster, IN. My undergrad education was at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, where I majored in Physics, Math, and Astrophysics, receiving a Bachelor of Science in each one.

What is the title of your Ph.D. or tentative title? Awards or biggest talk highlight?

(I'll get back to you on this one – some of that discussion is pending what we can do with Run 24 data...)

How did you decide to go into heavy ion or spin research?

I was introduced to the concept of heavy-ion collisions and QGP in a colloquium talk given by Jinfeng Liao at Indiana University, in my junior year of undergrad. Though my undergrad research at the time didn't have much to do with this subject, it sounded cool enough to form the basis for my application to an REU at CERN through University of Michigan that summer, where I worked with Alice Ohlson on a toy model implementing some of Volker Koch's ideas surrounding net-proton cumulants. From there, heavy-ion physics became one of my main areas of interest in grad school applications, and the rest is history!

What do you like to do in your spare time?

A lot of music, both playing and writing! I'm involved with a few different music groups at MIT, in a few different ways (trombone for the wind ensemble and jazz big band, tenor and occasional pianist for the vocal jazz ensemble), and I've also arranged or written music that was performed by each of those groups. In particular, the MIT Video Game Orchestra, which performs video game music arranged by members, is what I consider to be the most important use of my spare time! Every semester since I joined, I've been arranging video game music to be performed with this group, where I've played a bunch of different instruments (and have been known to sing once in a while as well, which may or may not be documented on youtube...). I was also briefly the keyboardist for the CERN-based band SkypeMom, from 2019 to 2020.

Fun fact?

In high school, I was part of a trombone quartet (yes, that's a real thing) called "The Bone Rangers;" at one point we played the national anthem at Wrigley Field for the opening of a Cubs game! For a non-music-related one, I got into fencing in undergrad, mostly wielding sabre, but did a bit of training in German longsword fencing as well!