[Link to New Personal Website]

Welcome to my (old) personal page!

I've very recently joined the Department of Physics at MIT as a Pappalardo Postdoctoral Fellow in Physics, working with Prof. Joseph Checkelsky and his group. I received a PhD in Physics from Princeton University in May 2023, where I worked with Prof. Ali Yazdani and his group. Before this, I studied physics and applied mathematics as an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.

I'm an experimental condensed matter physicist interested in the electronic and magnetic properties of quantum materials. Contemporary quantum materials research is broadly guided by two major themes: electronic correlation effects and topologically protected properties. Correlation effects result from interactions among an Avogadro number (~10²³) of electrons, which produce exotic collective phases of matter which cannot be understood as the sum of their parts. Topological properties are perplexingly immutable qualities of materials that are derived from geometric qualities of a material’s electronic energy bands. My research focuses on how these two paradigms give rise to new and unusual material properties, some of which may be useful for next-generation quantum technological applications.

Through my graduate work, my teammates and I used high-resolution scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) techniques to investigate exotic, electronic phases of matter. My research focused on understanding the microscopic mechanisms that give rise to superconducting or topologically protected phases in van der Waals heterostructure devices. These devices consist of stacks of two-dimensional materials that have been exfoliated, mixed-and-matched, twisted and combined into one, synergistic super material with newly engineered electronic properties. Using a homebuilt dilution refrigerator STM I helped build with a few of my labmates, we uncovered the quantum mechanical underpinnings of an exceedingly rich, gate-tunable landscape of phases in this material platform, but only when the sheets of graphene have been rotated ~1.1 degrees (so-called "magic angle") with respect to each other. Click here to read our latest papers on the high-temperature parent phase, correlated topological insulating phases, and the unconventional superconducting phase in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene!

In addition to my research, I'm involved in a few other groups on campus, including the Princeton Citizen Scientists (PCS). PCS is a graduate student organization on campus working to promote science locally and regionally through scientific outreach and advocacy. I'm also a trombonist in the Princeton University Orchestra and the Princeton Camerata, which are student performance groups that play concerts a few times a semester in the Princeton area. Finally, I'm a member of the Princeton University Mountaineering Club, which is more or less a mailing list to get groups together for hiking, camping, and climbing.