Paul Menker is a graduate student at the University of Southern California and USC-Carnegie. He works under Andrew Benson, and is broadly interested in the formation of the dark matter halos we observe today. To this end, he works with ensembles of plausible early universes, and attempts to reconcile these possibilities with observational data. At USC, he is also a member of the High-Energy Theory group, and the Graduate Association for Students in Physics.