I grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in a holler inbetween two very small, rural towns called Meadowview and Abingdon. They are both near the boarder of Virgina and Tennessee. I always like to joke that there were more cows than there were people.

Holler: Southern Appalachia word for a small valley between mountains.

Currently, I am a Ph.D. candidate in Nuclear and Particle Physics at Carnegie Mellon University working on the GlueX experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. My advisor is Professor Curtis Meyer, spokesperson of GlueX.

During 2019, I recieved my Bachelor of Science degrees from The College of William and Mary with honors in Physics and Mathematics. There, I worked with Professor Justin Stevens from the winter of 2016 to the spring of 2019 on exclusice $\pi^{0}$ production and Compton scattering which resulted in an honors thesis.

Starting in 2018, I was granted the opportunity to become a visiting student researcher for Dr. Ken Livingston at the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland. I worked on developing brand new approachs using machine learning techniques and simulations while in Scotland for the development of a compact pair polarimeter and spectrometer for use in future hadron physics experiments. It is stated that this polarimeter could do for hadron spectroscopy what the Hubble Telescope did for astronomy.

After working on these simulations, I helped with the development of a prototype and test ran it on the Mainzer Mikrotron (MAMI) at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

The need to increase the speed and performance for all computations (whether theoretical or experimental) within High Energy and Nuclear Physics is crucial. Because of this, I have began to specialize in the enhancement of scientific computational research through several means, including: High-Performance Computing and High-Throughput Computing. For my work, I was accepted and invited to attend two schools in 2022 and one in 2024 to further develop my skills, present on my current work on the topics, and to collaborate with other leading experts from around the world in various fields and disciplines across the sciences.

High-Performace Computing School – Athens, Greece

High-Throughput Computing School – Madison, Wisconsin

Computational and Data Science Training for High Energy Physics – Princeton, New Jersey

Current Research

My area of research is searching for the existence of exotic hybrid mesons, particularly on the $\pi^{0} \eta$ and $\pi^{0} \eta’$ systems. The interest in these two systems is due to the strong possibility of the presence of exotic $J^{PC}$ (quantum) numbers in their final states. By comparing both systems, the role of flavor symmetry should be shown as to allow for a better understanding of meson production mechanisms. Implementing a partial wave analysis will provide information as to what the exotic hybrid candidate with spin exotic-signature is. For more information on this and other similar topics, please email me or click on the physics navigation link in the header.

Example distributions from both $\pi^{0} \eta'$ and $\pi^{0} \eta$ systems

An article was recently written about the talks myself and several other young scientists gave about our research in Madison, Wisonsin. The talks focused on how each of us utilized High-Throughput Computing in our specific fields and scientific disciplines. A link to the article can be found here through the Open Science Grid website.