Since the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe in 1998, type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) have remained our most sensitive probe of dark energy. I joined the ESSENCE (Equation of State: SupErNova tracE Cosmic Expansion) project at the start of my graduate studies. ESSENCE observed over 200 SN Ia over seven years, in R and I at a median redshift of 0.4, and constrain the equation of state of dark energy, w, to 10%. I was heavily involved in schedule optimization, imaging, spectroscopic follow-up, pipeline development, data reduction and analysis. I lead the final analysis of the survey for my thesis. I have also been involved in cosmological studies using the Pan-STARRS telescope, and am working on combining PS1 supernovae with other literature samples. Together with my colleague Prof. Kaisey Mandel at Cambridge, I work on building Bayesian models to improve the inference of distances from SNIa light curves, and I’m very interested in understanding supernova progenitors and their relationship to the host environment. I am an active member of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration.