My Projects

I've been fortunate to be able to work on a number of interesting projects, both personal and professional. Some of the more notable ones are described below.

Northeastern University

Toric Calabi-Yau Manifolds

My graduate work at Northeastern, under my advisor Brent Nelson, focused on Calabi-Yau threefolds that can be constructed from four-dimensional reflexive lattice polytopes. The 4D reflexive polytopes were completely classified by Kreuzer and Skarke, and Batyrev showed that each fine, regular, star triangulation of these polytopes can be used to construct a Calabi-Yau threefold which is realized as a hypersurface in a multiply-weighted projective space. My collaborator Ross Altman constructed the ToricCY database, which contains explicit constructions of all unique threefolds for a subset of these polytopes. Together, we worked on projects that examined various properties of both the Kreuzer-Skarke and ToricCY datasets. These projects included exploring vacuum selection using a network model, constructing a systematic method for identifying and classifying all orientifold planes under a certain type of Z2 involution, and using machine learning to estimate the number of fine, regular, star triangulations of a given polytope.

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

WorldWide Telescope

I'm on the development team for WorldWide Telescope (WWT), which is a free and open-source software suite for astronomy and data visualization. WWT comes in a number of forms, including a Windows desktop client, an interactive web app, a research app for astronomy professionals, toolkits for Python and TypeScript, and embeddable iframes.

I've worked on a number of pieces of the WWT ecosystem, but one of the coolest visualizations I've helped make is this interactive below, which lets you see the first batch of images from JWST in context on the sky.

If you're interested in the moon, here's a custom view I made for International Observe the Moon Night.

glue

I'm also on the development team for glue, an open-source Python package that's great for interactive data analysis. Glue allows users to flexibly link related datasets within its framework, view the same data in multiple types of viewers simultaneously, and make subset selections that propagate automatically across all viewers. I've worked on the core glue package, as well as several of the plugins that have been created to extend glue's functionality. These include a WWT viewer and a Plotly plugin that includes exporters and viewers.

Cosmic Data Stories

The third project that I'm on the development team for is Cosmic Data Stories, a NASA-funded project that aims to teach data science to students using astronomy. We're currently almost done working on our first large data story, which focuses on Hubble's Law. Additionally, we've created multiple "mini" data stories - shorter interactives which highlight various astronomical phenomena.

The frontend for CosmicDS interactives is built using the Vuetify framework. The mini data stories are standalone browser experiences, while our larger data stories have a Python backend, using ipyvuetify to connect with out frontend widgets. Students can manipulate their data using glue viewers, in particular from glue's Jupyter frontend glupyter.

Personal Projects

D&D Spellbook 5e

I created a mobile application for looking up properties of D&D 5e spells while playing. The app allows keeping various spell lists for multiple characters, as well as filtering and sorting by a variety of different fields. The app is available on both Google Play and the App Store. I typically release updates on Android first, but try to keep the time between corresponding updates to a minimum.