Courses at Vanderbilt University
ASTR 3900 / 8090: General Relativity & Cosmology
Fall 2020 – Present
Cross-listed introductory general relativity course covering:
- Special relativity and spacetime geometry
- Einstein field equations
- Black holes and gravitational waves
- Cosmological models and the expanding universe
ASTR 3970 / 8070: Astrostatistics
Spring 2021 – Present
Cross-listed course on probability, statistical inference, data analysis, and machine learning. Highly interactive and centered around Jupyter notebooks. Developed by Taylor.
📚 Course Materials on GitHub:
ASTR 8001: Order of Magnitude Astrophysics
Fall 2019 (Guest Lecturer: Fall 2021)
Previous Teaching
- California Institute of Technology: Guest Lecturer, PH237: Gravitational Waves (Spring 2016)
- Niels Bohr International Academy: Guest Lecturer, Gravitational-Wave Astrophysics (Summer 2021)
Research Mentorship
Current Postdoctoral Fellows
- Matthew Miles (2025–present)
- Alexander Criswell (2024–present)
- Nima Laal (2023–present)
Former Postdocs (now faculty)
- Nihan Pol → Texas Tech University
- Maria Charisi → Washington State & Institute of Astrophysics, FORTH
Current Graduate Students
- Sebastian Banaszak (2025–present)
- Levi Schult (2022–present)
- Polina Petrov (2021–present)
- Kyle Gersbach (2021–present)
- William Lamb (2020–present)
Book
📘 “Nanohertz Gravitational Wave Astronomy”
Published November 24, 2021 by CRC Press (172 pp)
ISBN: 9780367768621