Erik Wessel is a graduate student and PhD candidate at the Department of Physics at the University of Arizona. He works in the numerical relativity group of Professor Vasileios Paschalidis. He has received NASA's FINESST fellowship to support his work on developing a neutrino-transport code for modeling binary neutron star mergers. Erik is the lead author on two publications investigating the potential for instabilities in massive accretion disks to produce gravitational wave signals detectable by next generation gravitational wave observatories. He received a Bachelor of Engineering Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also worked on numerical relativity with Dr. Eliu Huerta as part of the LIGO scientific collaboration. Prior to that, Erik worked on multiple software development projects as a student employee and NASA Space Grant Intern at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.