Research Statement

My doctoral research, which began in 2017, was largely focused on studies of various scenarios of new physics beyond the Standard Model that are of interest to the MoEDAL-MAPP experiment. This work was performed with a small team in which I was responsible for all aspects of these studies, from model development and computational implementation to model validation and phenomenological studies. Shortly after completing this work, I had the incredible opportunity to present my research to the CERN Research Board—a surreal experience that ultimately played a principal role in the subsequent approval of the Phase-1 MAPP detector in December 2021. In addition to the physics performance studies of the MAPP detector that comprised the main component of my doctoral thesis, I also played a key role in the construction of the MAPP-1 detector from the onset in 2020. Currently, I am primarily interested in the phenomenology of dark sector models that predict new feebly interacting particles and energy-frontier experiments that probe these models at particle accelerators. Accordingly, my current research involves the development, computational implementation, and simulation of such models, and in particular, studies of the sensitivity of the MoEDAL-MAPP detector to the new particles and phenomena that they predict.

I am also very interested in physics pedagogy and multidisciplinary research (at the intersection of physics, medicine, and biology), each of which I have pursued as additional ongoing research directions. In the former category, I have worked on pedagogical research focused on student learning of scattering problems in undergraduate quantum mechanics courses through a simple numerical approach with wave packets that allows for a more intuitive physical picture of the scattering process than the traditional plane wave approach. Regarding the latter category, I am fascinated by electromagnetic interactions with biological systems and have been conducting multidisciplinary research (with various colleagues at the University of Alberta and several companies) on the effects of different types of electromagnetic stimuli on cells and cellular components for several years.