EDUCATION

I study cosmological structure formation for the dual purposes of understanding the role that physics plays in creating galaxies, stars, and black holes and of using large samples of these astrophysical objects to probe fundamental physics. The nature of dark energy and dark matter: The influence of the dark energy on the expansion rate of the universe makes it possible to probe cosmology via statistical analysis of large surveys of high-redshift galaxies. As a member of HETDEX and Co-Chair of the LSST science collaboration on Large-Scale Structure, I will compare the “standard rod ” of baryon acoustic oscillations with the scale at which excess galaxy clustering is seen. This allows us to infer the dark energy equation-of-state and to probe its time evolution. We will combine this with our measurements of the growth of cosmological structure to investigate whether cosmic acceleration is caused by modifications to general relativity rather than dark energy. The galaxy power spectrum measured by these experiments will constrain dark matter properties including neutrino masses and their hierarchy. Formation of galaxies like the MilkyWay: Hierarchical cosmology predicts that typical present-day galaxies were formed by multiple low-mass protogalaxies at high redshift that underwent significant merging and rapid star formation. I study the clustering and spectral energy distributions of high-redshift galaxies in order to determine their dark matter halo masses, star formation histories, and present-day descendants