Research
Meet Robert Pearce
LEADS Lab
August 2025 - Present
Undergraduate Researcher
I conduct undergraduate research under Dr. Paul La Plante in UNLV’s LEADS Lab, running large-scale reionization simulations on the Bridges-2 supercomputer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. By varying parameters in the Zerion reionization model, I generate kinetic Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (kSZ) maps and analyze their angular power spectra to study the timing and structure of the Epoch of Reionization. My current focus is developing a machine-learning emulator that predicts the kSZ power spectrum directly from reionization parameters, enabling rapid exploration of parameter space without running new simulations.