Older Things

A complete pdf of my academic CV can be downloaded here.
A list of publications and presentations are here.

The following are some milestones from my CV from before my PhD.

MSc. in Theoretical Physics – PSI

From August 2018 to June 2019 I was a graduate student at the Perimeter Institute for the Theoretical Physics as part of the Perimeter Scholars International (PSI) graduate program. My thesis, Orbifolds, Anomalies, and Topological Field Theories, was supervised by Davide Gaiotto and studied the successive gauging of discrete abelian symmetries.

I’ve also investigated aperiodic tilings, their properties, and some connections to physics with Latham Boyle. Together we have investigated topologically defected quasicrystals, connections to the AdS/CFT correspondence, packing densities, and more!

Undergraduate Research

In 2017 I worked with Hubert de Guise from Lakehead University understanding the geometry of SU(N) anticoherent states; states which are very quantum in the way coherent states are very classical. Briefly, anticoherent states of order m are those such that \langle(S \cdot n )^k\rangle = 0 for all k \leq m and some fixed integer m.

For SU(2), a spin s state can be decomposed into 2s spin \frac{1}{2} states and then placed on the Bloch sphere, this is the Majorana representation.  When a coherent state is presented in the Majorana representation, all the points are coincident. When an anticoherent state is presented this way, the points are very evenly distributed. My work found an infinite class of such states for SU(N).

In this picture, we have the Majorana representation of an order m=2 SU(2) anticoherent state with total spin s=6.


I spent 2015 and 2016 at the University of Toronto with Dr. Peter Krieger and Dr. Robert Orr respectively, where I joined the ATLAS group to work on particle physics. In 2015 I used ROOT to investigate how energy was being deposited in the forward calorimeter in ATLAS and to automatically locate and diagnose faults in the calorimeter and detect offset from the beam axis. When I returned to the University of Toronto in 2016, I worked on a variety of hardware projects for production of the semiconductor tracker for ATLAS’s inner detector. In my spare time, I investigated the decays and production modes of the Higgs boson and learned MadGraph to assist with some analysis projects.

In the picture we can see electron hit frequency in a piece of silicon semiconductor for the ATLAS experiment.


In 2014 I worked with Hubert de Guise as a summer research student at Lakehead University on the properties of immanants, generalizations of determinants, and their relations to Wigner D-functions. My biggest task for this project involved coding the Murnaghan-Nakayama rule to compute the characters of irreducible representations of S_n in Mathematica. See the paper here and some of the code here.


HBSc. Mathematics with Physics Minor

My undergraduate degree is real!

In 2017, I graduated with my Honours Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Lakehead University, with a minor in physics and a 99% average.

I also spent time as a member of the Math Club, and as a student union representative on the Lakehead University Senate and the Lakehead University Academic Appeals Committee.

My thesis, Representation Theory and Quantum Mechanics, was supervised by Andrew J. Dean and was a literature review developing quantum mechanics following the work of George Mackey and introducing some of the results played by group representations in physics.

Governor General’s Academic Medal

When I graduated from Lakehead I was honoured to receive the Governor General’s Academic Silver Medal for graduating with the highest average in an Honours Bachelor degree in my university. I was also awarded the Dean’s Medal for the Faculty of Science and Environmental Studies and the Dean’s Scholar Award for Mathematics, for graduating with the highest average in the Faculty of Science and Environmental Studies and the Mathematics Department respectively.

Scholarships and Awards

Throughout my undergraduate degree I had the privilege to receive financial assistance and awards from various public and private organizations which are listed in my full CV. In addition to the NSERC USRAs I was awarded, one very important award for me was the Lakehead University Presidential Scholarship, which is awarded to two entering students at Lakehead University each year for contributions to their community and academic merit. Another important award was the C.D. Howe Scholarship Endowment Fund which is awarded to a student (from the Thunder Bay region) for academic achievement, community involvement, and extracurricular activities. These were awarded to me as an entering student and completely changed how I approached university.

Contributions to university scholarship programs significantly affects the life of students during and after graduate studies!