I completed my Ph.D. in physics at the University of Mississippi in June 2026, working on the kinematics of Causal Set Theory (CST) — a discrete approach to quantum gravity — under the supervision of Dr. Luca Bombelli.

My research centers on constructing a Weyl tensor analog for causal sets by studying geodesic deviation due to plane gravitational waves. This yielded a way of determining causal relations in gravitational-wave spacetimes — previously possible only for conformally flat ones, and what makes such causal sets simulable at all — together with a bound showing that the direct deviation route would need on the order of 10^8 elements to resolve the signal. Alongside this, I measured the spatial spread of all possible longest chains between a pair of elements: they form a “tube” whose transverse width grows as H^0.56 with the height H of the causal interval, a quantity that, in the guise of last-passage percolation, is the transversal fluctuation exponent of the KPZ universality class. I have also explored action-based formulations of classical dynamics, motivated by the absence of a natural Hamiltonian in causal sets.