Research

(Image credit: NASA Goddard's Space Flight Center)

My current research interests are in the formation and evolution of massive black holes in their galactic environments. I am especially interested in intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs), the large seed black hole formation channel for supermassive black holes, and the gravitational wave signals from IMBH merger events. My current project investigates event rates of massive black hole binary (MBHB) mergers within the Romulus25 simulation (Tremmel et. al. 2017). Our goal is to incorporate host galaxy properties into our estimations for MBHB merger timescales as preparatory work for the highly anticipated LISA mission.

At Denison University, I researched under Dr. Dan Homan in the Active Galaxy Lab. My main focus was in improving our implementation of the CLEAN deconvolution algorithm in its application to radio jets from active galactic nuclei (AGN). Our most recent project investigated the use of entropy in the CLEAN residual images as a stopping metric for the algorithm and a diagnostic metric for calibration issues within the observational data.

Publications

  1. Holley-Bockelmann, K., Khan, F., Williams, I., Roth, J. S., Rizzo Smith, M., Porter, K., Bellovary, J., Derdzinski, A., Maccio, A. V. (2025). Handy Relation between Binary Black Hole Merger Times and Host Galaxy Properties. ApJL 995, L32
  2. Homan, D. C., Roth, J. S., & Pushkarev, A. B. (2024). Residual Entropy as a Diagnostic and Stopping Metric for CLEAN. AJ 167, 11