Physics & Astronomy

I am a faculty member in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Brigham Young University (BYU). Before coming to BYU, I was a faculty member at Northern Arizona University (NAU). Prior to my academic appointments, I worked in the Solid State Theory Group with Alex Zunger at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. I recieved a Ph.D. from Univ. of California, Davis under Barry M. Klein.

My current research interests include high-throughput computational materials science, developing algorithms for alloy modeling, thermodynamic simulations (metadynamics, Wang-Landau sampling, flat-histogram methods), lattice-configuration enumeration, and using compressive sensing for building physical models. I am a co-developer of the UNCLE code for cluster expansion modeling.

I love teaching anything in physics curriculum, but my primary teaching-related interests are computational physics and scientific computing, solid-state physics, general education science (such as BYU's PS100 course), group-theory, statistical and thermal physics, and advanced mathematical physics.