User Portlet

I am a theorist specializing in black holes, classical and quantum gravity, and relativistic astrophysics. I am the Project Scientist for the Black Hole Explorer and have been an Assistant Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Vanderbilt since 2022.

I am a co-recipient of the 2024 New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Foundation (together with Michael Johnson) and was also awarded the 2024 IUPAP General Relativity and Gravitation Early Career Scientist Prize from the International Society on General Relativity & Gravitation for my work on black hole imaging. In 2025, Science News Magazine listed me as one of ten “Scientists to Watch” for their outstanding contributions to their field, and the Society for Science awarded me the Jon C. Graff, PhD Prize for Excellence in Science Communication.​

I received my undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in 2011 and 2017, respectively, and was then a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2017 to 2020 before joining the Princeton Gravity Initiative as an Associate Research Scholar from 2020 to 2022.

I am currently developing a NASA mission proposal to launch a satellite into Earth orbit that will take the sharpest images in the history of astronomy: the Black Hole Explorer. BHEX is designed to peer all the way down to the event horizon of a black hole and measure the “photon ring” of light that orbits around it. Together with an international team of scientists and engineers, we are now hard at work designing and prototyping the instruments and spacecraft for BHEX. We are also gearing up to propose BHEX as the next NASA Small Explorers Mission, which is slated for a 2032 launch. The journey ahead will be difficult but we are excited for BHEX to fly and push our understanding of spacetime to the absolute limit.