I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Montana State University. Prior to moving to beautiful Bozeman, I was both a Hubble and Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow. I didn't know I wanted to be an astronomer growing up, but got hooked while taking Astronomy 101 as an undergrad at the University of Maryland. My first research experience was an optical SETI project at San Francisco State University and I later went on to study star formation in dwarf galaxies at the University of Virginia. During my last year of graduate school there, I discovered the first dwarf starburst galaxy known to host a supermassive black hole! I've been finding and studying black holes in dwarf galaxies ever since, which is currently our best observational probe of the origin of the first "seeds" of supermassive black holes
Over the past decade, we have come to appreciate that essentially every normal galaxy, including our Milky Way, harbors a supermassive black hole at its center. These monsters play an important role in the evolution of galaxies and the appearance of the observable universe, but their origin is largely unknown.
