About me
 More about me
 Curriculum Vitae
 Research stuff
 My papers (courtesy of Spires)
 Teaching stuff

Physics Stuff
 UC Davis Cosmology
 The arXiv
 Slac Spires

Some Fun Stuff
 Foxtrot Comics
 Ph.D. Comics
 Cosmic Variance
 Yosemite National Park

Contact

Phone: (530) 752-5780
Fax: (530) 752-4717 (physics dept. office)
Address:
  Department of Physics
  University of California
  One Shields Ave.
  Davis, CA 95616, USA

The big news is that I've just finished my Ph.D. - I finally am, now, Doctor Kiley! I've been hired as a lecturer at UC Merced for the next year, starting this summer!

Me in more detail...

I've always loved science. I graduated from Lincoln High School in Stockton, California way back in 1995, where I first became interested in physics. I spent a year working as an electrician for the 3D Electric company in Benicia, California, doing residential construction. I wired houses and things like that. I'd actually been working on weekends and during the summers doing the same thing for many years. It's nice to know how to do all these things like adding plugs or fans, etc.

After a year, I started attending my local community college San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, where I immediately declared my major to be physics. I enjoyed the courses, and did quite well, and except for a very brief flirtation with changing my major to math, I always maintained my major. Near the end of my time at Delta, I spent a semester tutoring various levels of mathematics in the Math Lab, and several different topics, including physics, math, and chemistry in the Tutor Center. It was during this time that I first developed my interest in teaching, and the students seemed to like me. :-)

After taking all sorts of classes at Delta, bouncing around a little bit, and going back to work as an electrician again, I finally got back to school at the University of California, Davis in 2001. I transferred in with a couple upper-division classes under my belt, and so I was able to take the senior-level classes as a Junior, and then I took most of the first-year graduate classes as a Senior. I finally graduated with my Bachelor's degree in physics in June of 2003. I liked Davis so much that I decided to stay for grad school!

I started graduate school in September of 2003, starting with the very enjoyable second-year courses in high-energy physics. I passed the preliminary exam in September of 2004, on my first attempt. I then passed the qualifying exams (the orals) in May of 2006, based on my work on black holes and shockwaves on codimension-2 branes. I published my first paper with Nemanja Kaloper in 2006, and then two more in 2007, including a solo paper. I gave my first technical talk in the high-energy seminar at Davis, then a couple weeks later at the Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting at UC Santa Barbara in front of lots of people I had heard of before! I then got to spend an extremely nice three weeks at a summer school on Cosmology and Astroparticle physics, and also a workshop on Nongaussianity in Cosmology, in Trieste, Italy during July of 2006.