Currently

I joined the ATLAS experiment in March 2009 as a member of the LBNL ATLAS group. At present, I am working on the high luminosity upgrade of the ATLAS pixel detector, specifically the replacement of the innermost (B0) layer.

Ph.D. Thesis work

I obtained my Ph.D. from Rutgers University in October 2008. The title of my thesis was "Search for Supersymmetry at the Tevatron using the Trilepton Signature". A succint description of supersymmetry was given by Joanne Hewett in the Symmetry magazine:
Supersymmetry is a proposed property of the universe. Supersymmetry requires every type of particle to have an associated supersymmetric particle, called its superpartner. The superpartner is a heavy replica of a particle, with one other significant difference. All particles are classed as either fermions or bosons. A particle belonging to one class has a superpartner in the other, thereby "balancing the books" and making nature more symmetric. For example, the superpartner of an electron (a fermion) is called a selectron (a boson). Supersymmetry describes a grand dance of particles through the universe, but we can currently see only one partner from each pair. The unseen particles might be the source of the mysterious "dark matter" in galaxies. Although superpartners have not yet been observed in nature, they might soon be produced in particle accelerators on Earth.
Specifically, I looked for the associated production of the chargino and the neutralino. The charginos/neutralinos are the supersymmetric partners of the gauge bosons (W/Z) in the Standard Model. Although that is a slight oversimplification it helps to illustrate the main focus of the analysis. Like the W/Z leptonic decays, the chargino/neutralino decay to a final state with three leptons, one or more neutrinos and two neutralinos. The results of this search were published in PRL in December 2008. A detailed description of the methods used, and the results obtained can be found in my thesis (full text here).

Other work as graduate student

A interesting challenge of SUSY models is multiple parameters. Results are usually presented in terms of a subset of the complete list of relevant parameters. An extension to the complete list is usually not trivial. For example, in the mSUGRA model, results are presented as a function of the parameters m0 and m½. The other three mSUGRA parameters (tan(),A0 and sign of µ) are kept fixed. To overcome this, I worked on an idea to break down search sensitivity according to the tau-lepton content of the trileptons. Along with the co-authors,I was able to present a recipe to extend the interpretation of the Tevatron trilepton search results to the general mSUGRA model. These results can be found on the arXiv:0808.1605.