I am a current CCAPP Postdoctoral Fellow interested in all things involving time-domain astronomy. I recently obtained my PhD at the Institute for Astronomy (U Hawai’i at Manoa) where I was a Dept of Energy (DOE) Computational Science Graduate Fellow (CSGF) applying high-performance computing to various aspects of observational astronomy.

My research uses various sky surveys (e.g., ASAS-SN, ATLAS) to study variable objects throughout the Universe. I co-founded the Spectroscopic Classification of Astronomical Transients (SCAT, Tucker+ 2022c) survey to capitalize on the steady stream of transients discovered by sky surveys. SCAT uses the SuperNova Integral Field Spectrograph (SNIFS) on the University of Hawai’i 88-inch telescope which is specifically designed for spectrophotometry of transient objects. We have already used SNIFS to great effect in studying the rare and unusual occurring in the Universe, including observing the formation of an asymmetric tidal disruption event (TDE) accretion disk (Holoien+ 2019), studying a new low-mass black-hole X-ray binary system ASASSN-18ey (Tucker+ 2018b), and the discovery of a “changing-look” blazar (Mishra+ 2021), in addition to classifying hundreds of transients.

I focus most of my time on understanding how and why white dwarfs explode as Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), primarily in the nebular phase when the inner regions of the ejecta become visible using OSU’s access to the Large Binocular Telescope. Despite these explosions being crucial distance estimators and cosmological probes, we still lack a genuine understanding of how and why the white dwarf explodes.

In general, I am interested in almost anything that varies in brightness and I have published papers covering stellar flares, accreting black holes, and the iron-rich cores of supernovae.

A full list of my publications can be found on my ADS page and my CV.