Research

I lead the Washburn Astrobiophysics research group, which includes faculty and students here at Washburn. Broadly speaking, we study effects on the Earth's atmosphere and biosphere by astrophysical sources of radiation.


If you are looking for publicly available data from our work, click here or check on Zenodo.


You can find more on my publications on my profiles on ORCID, ResearchGate, and Google Scholar. You can find pre-prints of most of my papers on the arXiv.


Our work is pretty darn cool, and tends to get a fair bit of media coverage:


I was recently principal investigator on a 3-year, $500,000 grant entitled "Terrestrial Impact of Nearby Supernovae" which was recently awarded to WU in collaboration with the University of Kansas and MidAmerica Nazarene University. The following articles discuss the project:


Earlier, I was principal investigator on a 3-year, $500,000 grant entitled "Astrophysical Ionizing Photon Events and Primary Productivity of Earth's Oceans" that was awarded to WU in 2009, in collaboration with the University of Kansas and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. The following articles discuss the project:


I have also been involved in an investigation of possible causes of a major increase in carbon-14 at 774-775 AD (which indicates a major astrophysical radiation source at that time). See the following articles for more:


Of course the classic threat to life on Earth is an asteroid or comet impact, so I've had to get involved in that as well: "Cometary airbursts and atmospheric chemistry: Tunguska and a candidate Younger Dryas event":


Read news articles about my article "Superluminous supernovae: No threat from Eta Carinae":


Read news articles about my article "Modeling atmospheric effects of the September 1859 solar flare":


My work studying the effects on the Earth's atmosphere by a supernova was featured in the March, 2007 issue of Sky & Telescope, in an article entitled "The Supernova Menace."


My dissertation project was an investigation of the possible effects of a (relatively) nearby gamma-ray burst (GRB) event upon the earth's atmosphere. This is part of a larger project which seeks to answer the question of whether a GRB event may have triggered one of the largest mass extinctions in the earth's history, that of the late Ordovician.

This project has gained some media attention over the last few years:

A paper detailing early work on the project was published in August (2004) in the International Journal of Astrobiology (vol. 3, pg. 55) and a pre-print is available here. My work at KU on this project was supported by a NASA Astrobiology grant.


My first graduate research project was on redshift distortions specifically as a probe of the mass density of the universe. A paper on this work was published in the January 20, 2004 edition of Astrophysical Journal (ApJ 601, 28). A pre-print is available here. I am continuing to work on this project part time, along with collaborators.

In the past, I worked for two summers at UOP on a project investigating frequency doubling organic compounds. Mostly I used CAChe molecular modeling software to check computationally the properties of compounds that organic chemists were producing in a lab.

I also spent a summer at UC Santa Cruz, doing work with the Institute for Particle Physics, through the REU program. I spent my time there working on two different projects. One involved analysis of data from a test run of a prototype of what would become the Fermi satellite gamma ray detectors. The other was investigating a new material for use in high energy physics detectors.