Active matter consists of self-propelled individuals, such as humans walking, fish swimming, or colloids propelling from chemical reactions. Activity enables these individuals to come together, interact, and act collectively: humans form crowds, fish form schools, and active colloids phase separate into a dense and dilute phase. However, activity continuously drives the system out of equilibrium, making it a challenge to predict system behaviors. My goal is to increase our understanding of active matter through computation to enable the design of experimental systems and applications, such as drone swarms.

A photodetector is a device that senses the presence of light of a specific wavelength. Next-generation photodetectors have gained increasing interest due to their widespread applications in image sensing, radiation detection, and fiber-optic communication. Perovskite, unlike most commercial detectors, is a solution-processed semiconductor, therefore, perovskite photodetectors can be mass-produced quickly and cheaply, like newspapers.

A fusion plasma is a soup of fast-moving ions that continuously interact and combine to form heavier ions, releasing significant amounts of energy in the process. Fusion reactors, such as the Madison Symmetric Torus (MST), attempt to harness this virtually inexhaustible supply of energy. However, current fusion generators are non-ideal for sustained fusion, i.e. MST plasmas have a signifiant number of aluminum impurities due to its aluminum vacuum vessel. Diagnostics allow us to understand the plasma properties, infer why the plasma possesses them, and design improvements for future iterations of fusion plasma experiments.