Thushara’s research area is observational and experimental cosmology, a subject that lies at the intersection of physics and astronomy. As a graduate student at Case Western, Thushara worked on detecting dark matter - a hypothesized form of matter that would make up most of the inferred mass of our universe and galaxy. As a postdoctoral researcher, first at the University of Chicago and then at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Thushara developed and used superconducting and semiconducting technologies for mm-wavelength observations of the oldest structures in the universe, such as massive early galaxies and the primordial glow from the big bang, known as the cosmic microwave background.