About Me

Academic Journey

My name is Damien, and I'm from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I'm currently working on finishing my bachelor's degree in physics. I've maintained a 4.0 GPA, I was named a 2026 Astronaut Scholar by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, and I received the SPS Google Scholarship!

Research Interests

My primary focus is theoretical physics, especially quantum gravity, holography, and quantum information. Lately that has meant a lot of anti-de Sitter space. For my graduate general relativity final project I studied the Klein-Gordon equation on Anti-de Sitter Spacetime, deriving the metric from the Einstein field equations, reducing the field equation to a radial ODE, and working through the boundary asymptotics that lead to the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound. I also present regularly at our SPS journal club, most recently on van Raamsdonk's 2010 paper connecting quantum entanglement to spacetime geometry.

In an honors project with Dr. Souvik Das, I recreated quantum entanglement experiments using IBM quantum computers, working on both simulation and real hardware to demonstrate violations of the CHSH inequality. That work grew into a self-contained technical writeup, a three-lecture series, and a poster at SPSCon 2025.

I've also been researching gamma-ray burst afterglows with Dr. Donald Warren. This has included running and analyzing large numerical simulations, building and curating training data and quality-assurance tools, and writing code for data handling and visualization. The work led to a contributed talk at the ASROC Annual Meeting in Taiwan. It was my first international conference, and it pushed me to sharpen how I explain the work and our technical choices.