Mysteries of Universe Imprinted on Redshifts

Shadab Alam
2018
Acknowledgments Caring is the word I would like to use to describe Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) physics community. Even in a foreign land, though with a shared desire to learn physics, the CMU community made me feel at home. This thesis is possible only because of the many people who have heard me with patience, appreciated my experiences, validated my identity and allowed me to prosper. This acknowledgement is my attempt to thank constant support I have received. I would like to thank
more » ... ryone with all my sincerity for making this thesis possible. Shirley has been the most cheerful advisor I have met. She is very knowledgeable, intelligent, well known, resourceful, and encouraging, which are all the qualities I hoped for in my advisor. She is also very friendly, caring, cheerful and understanding, which were never on my list of expectation as a naive first-year graduate student. She has such high excitement and energy levels that even in the most gloomy days, one feels that all is well. She has been providing insightful direction and support which has shaped each and every chapter of this thesis. She has patiently seen innumerable incomprehensible plots and has painstakingly gone through crude texts of every write-up I produced. One of the very valuable thing in my experience of working with her has been the amount of freedom she provided and the highly interacting working group she has nurtured at CMU. I would like to thank her for inspiring and enabling us to do exciting science. I would like to thank Rupert Croft and Rachel Mandelbaum, who are not only a part vi of my thesis committee but have also continuously guided me during my Ph.D. Rupert has been instrumental in making me see beyond my cynicism and lack of confidence while working on gravitational redshift project. Also, chapter 7, which is the project I enjoyed the most, was developed with the help of his insight and has been the most adventurous research idea in my Ph.D. He was also very patient when for months I was not able to make much progress. I owe thanks to Rachel for her constructive criticism, which helped me develop my writing skills. I have lost count of the number of revisions we have done and the number of flaws I discovered in the initial draft of my project with her. I am inspired by her deep insight into the gravitational lensing studies. She has an eye for details which I can only dream of possessing. I would like to thank Martin White for being involved with my PhD. from the beginning, even before we met for the first time. He has been instrumental in not only creating the knowledge base on which my thesis rests but also shaping my papers. He patiently went through many of my papers and provided incredibly insightful comments regarding the science as well as the organization of the articles. He also generously became the external member of my thesis committee. I still remember about one of the very first emails I sent to him late in the night, and how he responded almost immediately with profound questions which took me days to understand. Such interactions with Martin not only helped improved my understanding but also motivated me to work harder. I would like to thank Ayesha for being the rock of Gibraltar of my life. I wonder how I would have managed the ups and downs of graduate life without she being beside me.
doi:10.1184/r1/6720794 fatcat:rqkprctq2zdkppqrvkgvfhrjnq