I'm a member of the faculty in the astronomy and astrophysics department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Niels Bohr Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute. My research focuses on the violent universe with an emphasis on stellar explosions, gamma-ray bursts, and accretion phenomena near compact objects. I did my graduate work at the  Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge in England, where I was a member of  Wolfson College. Before coming to Santa Cruz, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.