Cassandra Moats
Hometown: Economy, PA
Undergraduate Institution: The Ohio State University
Current Stage and Institution: Master’s student, Fisk University
Track: Astrophysics
Research: Broadly, my interests lie with dark matter and the history of the universe. Seeking answers to such fundamental questions has led me to having interest in working with dark matter (including primordial black holes), gravitational waves (especially with LISA), black holes, EMRIs/IMRIs, AGNs, galaxy evolution and galactic archaeology, binary star evolution, especially determining the conditions that impact the fates of massive stars) and supernovae. My current research is a good intersection of several of these interests. I am working to create a map of the sky seen by LISA if dark matter partially consists of primordial black holes (PBHs). With this work, I aim to determine how well LISA can probe the nature of dark matter through large scale structure, accounting for the small sample size of PBH binary mergers that LISA would detect and the imprecise sky localization.