About me

I am an experimental physicist with over fourteen years in research and teaching across three countries. Performing these two tasks well requires empathy, honesty, and acceptance of healthy criticism. With these principles I have published 23 papers as co-author, six as first author, taught graduate sensor technologies as well as bachelors and high school physics and math.

From December 2018 to July 2026, I had the honor of supporting the Research Unit of Nano- and Microsensors, in the Institute of Sensors and Actuator Systems (ISAS) at TU Wien, as an international postdoc with interdisciplinary experience. Though nanoelectromechanical sensors (NEMS) was a new subject for me, I mastered lock-in detection, PLLs, micro and nanoresonator fabrication and characterization including the physical noise characteristics and limits of these systems. I gained more experience with control systems interfacing and FEM simulations. The work I was most proud of was using my knowledge of the SVD and global and target analyses of ultrafast spectroscopy and applying it uniquely to "slow" thermogravimetric photothermal nanomechanical desorption spectroscopy-- boy, that's a mouthful -- inventing a new form of separation science for adsorbed chemical species. This was just part of an amazing co-authored work by my co-mentored doctorate student.

My doctoral work was my introduction to living in Europe. At the Univeristy of South Bohemia I dived into in ultrafast multi-pulse transient absorption spectroscopy of natural light-harvesting systems, where I specifically contributed by developing a kinetic modeling and regression script, which untangled the associated spectra of coupled excited states. To accomplish this, I applied my knowledge of simple modeling of population dynamics from my master's study on QD energy transfer, partly with newfound knowledge of the monte-carlo method and linear regression.

My teaching experience spans graduate level to high school: engaging graduate lecturing, curriculum redesign, doctoral research mentoring, undergraduate physics laboratory instruction, and high school (secondary school) math instruction in geometry and prealgebra. I also tutored bachelor and high school students in physics, math, scholastic organization, and ACT and SAT exam preparation.

English is my native language, I speak Slovak, and my German is at B1 and improving.