Patrick Wells

An excellent piece of scientific software can make all the difference when performing research. But building excellent software requires a deep understanding of engineering principles and technologies. I focus a large part of my time on developing these skills, and use them to build software that allows scientists to focus on science, not on the tools they use to do it.

At Argonne, I build software and systems as part of the OpenCosmo project that aims to make it easier for scientists to work with large-scale cosmological simulations. Whether it's small analysis outputs produced during a scientific workflow or petabyte-scale survey data, automating the tedious parts makes us all more productive.

Strong Gravitational Lensing as a Cosmological Probe

Gravitational lensing is an immensely powerful tool for studying the universe. In the modern era of survey astronomy, lensing systems that were once wholly unique are simply members of an ever-growing ensemble. By combining the information from many of these systems, we can constrain cosmological parameters and probe the fundamental nature of dark matter.

My PhD work focused on characterizing the environments of strong gravitational lenses for the purpose of constraining the Hubble Constant with time-delay cosmography. I developed foundational software tools for performing the analysis at scale, and provided compelling evidence for a systematic overdensity in the environments of strong lenses. I argue that these overdensities are best described with extreme-value statistics, suggesting that the external convergence signal is dominated by a small number of massive structures along the line of sight.

At Argonne, I am developing software to study the profiles of dark matter halos in modern cosmological simualations and understand the likelihood they will produce strong lensing systems. These tools will be used to help us better characterize the systematic uncertainties in the concentration-mass relation inferred from observations of strong lenses.

The universe is breathtakingly beautiful, and often much stranger than many of us realize. I believe that communicating about my work is a central part of being a great scientist.

During graduate school, I spent a significant amount of time teaching introductory physics for students in the life sciences. Many of these students had no previous physics experience, and most were taking physics exclusively to fulfill a requirement for their degree. Although I love opportunites to give talks to fellow experts, I have found I grow the most as a communicator when forced to present material in a way that is accessible and exiting to a general audience.

At Argonne, I have continued to engage in outreach activities in the local community. This includes events such as the Hour of Code and career fairs with local high school students.

Contact

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Elements

i = 0;

while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
    print 'Iteration ' + i;
    deck.shuffle();
    i++;
}

print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';