Steven Dorsher

I am a physics, math, and astronomy tutor.

As a teacher, I have worked as a lab instructor for 6 years as a graduate teaching assistant, followed by a year of volunteering in online forums, and more than two years of professional tutoring. I enjoy teaching because it is something that really makes a difference to students dreams and success, and where I get to do something I love, sharing that knowledge and helping others.

15+ years research in physics and astronomy,

10+ years scientific programming,

8 years teaching

Studying Data Science: part time in the Data Quest certificate program as work and health allow.

Education:

• MS Physics LSU

• MS Physics U of MN

• MS Astronomy Ohio State

• BS MIT 2004

Physics Fields:

• Black Holes (EMRI's, LISA)

• Gravitational Waves (LIGO)

• Particle Physics

• Neutrinos (MINOS, NOvA)

• Exoplanets

• Cosmology

• Fractional Calculus

Scientific Computing:

• Most fluent in Python

• Previous experience with:

  • C++/C (6.5 years)

  • Fortran (5 years)

  • Matlab (2.5 years)

I have 20+ publications total with most significant contributions to 8 of them. The rest were as a result of membership in LIGO.

Since graduating from LSU in 2017, I have developed an orbital dynamics simulation of three stars orbiting each other using Newtonian physics in Python. My greatest success in this independent research has been to see the energy transfer between the inner binary and the outer planet over the orbit of the outer planet.

My masters work at LSU, in contrast, focused on the extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRIs) of solar mass black holes around the super massive black holes at the centers of galaxies. I simulated a scalar field toy model of the full general relativistic case. This is useful and important for developing higher precision waveform computation techniques for the future space based gravitational wave detector LISA. In EMRIs, the self force is the force due to the small black hole's curvature interacting with the background spacetime of the large blackhole-- this creates a force called the self force that alters the orbit of the smaller black hole about the central larger black hole and causes it to spiral inward while emitting gravitational waves. I ported a large C++ code from a FORTRAN code, successfully simulating quasinormal mode ringdown in a vacuum, like that following the merger of the two black holes. I also simulated effective scalar self-force loops about the blackhole.

I have also worked on the LIGO gravitational wave detector experiment both in a database development role at LSU during the time of the first three gravitational wave detections (though I was not an author at that time) and also on a detection algorithm for gravitational waves with linearly evolving frequencies prior to that. In a spectrogram, those would look like diagonal lines.

My other past research is in cosmology, exoplanets, neutrinos, theoretical particle physics, and fractional calculus.