About me:
I am a professor in the Department
of Physics at Allegheny College, in my hometown of
Meadville, PA.
My undergraduate studies were in physics at
Princeton University,
and I went to graduate school in the
Department of Astronomy at
Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.
I taught at Vassar College for eight years before arriving at
Allegheny in 2006. I have beautiful daughters named Lynnea and
Abigail, and my wife Sheryl is a beautiful person too.
My research students and I do work in
computational astrophysics. In particular, we use hydrodynamic
simulations to help determine what happens when stars collide.
For more details, see this background
information and
my
publications. To hear me speak on the implications of collisions in astronomy, see this episode of Cosmic Collisions that aired on the Discovery Channel. Or check out my research talks delivered at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB: here's one on the hydrodynamics code we use in our simulations and another on how we calculate what and how much light would be emitted from merging stars.
Last updated: June 2017