Stargazing into the clear Kansas skies throughout my childhood inspired my interest in astrophysics. One of my favorite memories growing up was creating an astronomy club at my high school and going on stargazing adventures with my friends. I lived in a suburb but only a short drive away from the city lights there would be vast open prairies with crystal clear night skies. Figure 1 shows a Kansas sunset before a night of stargazing.
I decided to to pursue an academic career in astrophysics starting with my BSc at the University of Washington, Seattle from 2015-2019. By my first week of school, I was already doing research thanks to the Pre-Major Astronomy Program. I quickly discovered that much of modern astrophysics research is essentially applied data science. For example, my projects would require a literature review (business understanding), advanced statistical techniques to summarize data (exploratory data analysis) and paper-quality data visualization using Python. I enjoyed leveraging these skills/tools to address exciting questions about the universe. Read more about by undergraduate work here.
I enjoyed it so much that I decided to do a PhD in astrophysics at the University of California, Riverside (2019-2024). Broadly, I worked to find simple, inexpensive and reliable solutions to complex astronomical problems. This was mainly done reducing the dimensionality of problems, leveraging deep/machine learning models, and designing experiments to test these solutions. I found it exciting to see how different data science tools and processes would derive meaningful insights from the datasets. As I grew as a researcher, I began to realize that I am more interested in the data science aspect of this work rather than the astronomical application.
My feelings towards data science, and away from academia, was further augmented when I underwent a health scare in 2020. I randomly went into an out-of-hospical cardiac arrest, which has a survival rate of only ~9%, but survived essentially unscathed. This stroke of luck was made possible by numerous people that treated, supported, and literally saved me. These people have inspired me to re-think my career trajectory into a sector that has a direct, real-world impact on people today such as through agriculture, medicine, and community building. For example, I briefly worked as a farm-hand at the KC Farm School during my recovery (see figure 2), done personal projects augmenting medical datasets and tracking human movement (see personal projects), and have led major community-based latin music and dance programming with the Riverside Salsa Collective. After my health scare, I returned to UCR to complete my PhD, with a renewed focus on developing the data science skills necessary for a career in a sector that has a direct, real-world impact on people. Read more my data science experiences in astrophysics here.
I recently earned my Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Riverside (September 2024) and am now actively seeking a data scientist role.