Jacob studies X-ray instrumentation with applications for high energy astronomy. Motivated by the NICER telescope launched in 2017 and the following SEXTANT demonstration, Jacob is primarily interested in the characterization of pulsar emission and optimization of X-ray telescopes for pulsar observation. This work currently involves fabrication of slumped glass mirror substrates, electron-beam deposition of metallic reflective coatings, and optical metrology. Other work involves phase-resolved spectral analysis.