David Barker

I started my college career at the University of Idaho in Moscow, ID studying criminology. After graduation I joined the US Navy as a Surface Warfare Officer (SWO), where I would serve for 4 years. After completing my time in the Navy in 2018, I continued my education at University of Colorado Boulder in the Astrophysics and Planetary Sciences department, graduating in 2022. I’ve worked with groups studying a wide variety of different topics from passive dark matter detectors to cislunar orbital architectures. I’m currently working with Jack Burns and the 21 cm cosmology group developing simulations and signal extraction techniques for moon-based radio telescopes such as LuSEE-Night and ROLSES-2.  This is all in an effort to identify the cosmic Dark Ages signal at very early redshift (z ~ 1100 – 20), which will likely be among the most important observations of modern cosmology. If this is the kind of exciting observation that interests you, check out this paper about a future interferometer on the moon that also has an excellent introduction section of 21 cm cosmology: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03840.

Scholastic Achievements:

Graduated with distinction, CU Boulder