My research broadly aims to uncover what we can learn about the dark matter in our own backyard. Whether that’s quite literally in your backyard on Earth (and perhaps directly detectable) or in the Local Group of nearby galaxies, I study how it is distributed, how it got here, and how we can detect it. For more, see this page, which gives a short, approachable introduction to my research.

Publications

In the feed below, you can find a summary post for each paper I’ve written. See the posts themselves for more details, or view my full publication record on the following databases:

---

How to Build an Empirical Speed Distribution for Dark Matter in the Solar Neighborhood

October 2025 • Papers

This paper shows how to leverage ex situ stellar kinematics as tracers for the speed distribution of accreted dark matter. This allows us to go beyond the simple Maxwell–Boltzmann approximation by folding in knowledge about a galaxy's assembly history. We apply this to the Milky Way itself, using Gaia data to quantify how modeling the dark matter from the GSE merger impacts the inferred speed distribution.

Dark Matter Velocity Distributions for Direct Detection: Astrophysical Uncertainties are Smaller Than They Appear

May 2025 • Papers

Predictions for the local dark matter speed are crucial for interpreting the data from direct detection experiments, but the current state of the art fails to properly quantify astrophysical uncertainties. I address this shortcoming using the largest, highest-resolution simulation to date, definitively characterizing halo-to-halo variance. I propose a novel analysis procedure that dramatically improves the precision of our prediction compared to previous studies, on par with other systematics.

Cosmological Simulations of Stellar Halos with Gaia Sausage–Enceladus Analogues: Two Sausages, One Bun?

August 2024 • Papers

In this paper, I search Milky Way–like galaxies in TNG50 for mergers that resemble the GSE—our most recent major merger—and find them a third of the time. I allow for the GSE to be comprised of two mergers, rather than necessarily being a single merger, and these pairs account for approimately a third of the GSEs. It's hard to tell single-merger GSEs apart from two-merger GSEs, except that the single mergers are typically accreted more recently.

Probabilistic Inference of the Structure and Orbit of Milky Way Satellites with Semi-Analytic Modeling

November 2023 • Papers

It can be difficult to extrapolate from observed properties of dwarf galaxies to properties of their dark matter halos. In this work, I propose a procedure to do this using the SatGen semi-analytic model, which efficiently samples over astrophysical uncertainties such as the stellar mass–halo mass relation and baryonic feedback perscriptions. This approach provides realistic correlated uncertainties and aids interpretability beyond simple empirical scaling relations. The method is easily extensible and my code is publicly available.