Search for Top Squark Production using Run 2 Data from the CMS Experiment at the LHC

The Standard Model of particle physics is an experimentally successful description of the fundamental building blocks and properties of the universe. Yet some questions remain, with no candidates for dark matter or explanation for the masses and oscillations of neutrinos. Even the addition of the Higgs raised more questions, as its measured mass implies an unnatural degree of precision in the corrections to its mass. These corrections scale with the mass of the particle interacting with the Higgs, with the top quark giving the largest contribution within the Standard Model. The addition of Supersymmetry would ameliorate this, providing supersymmetric partners for each Standard Model particle to help cancel out their corrections. This dissertation presents a search for the top squark, supersymmetric partner to the top quark, using data from the CMS detector taken during the years 2016-2018. The data were taken at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 137 inverse femtobarns. The search targets fully-hadronic final states of multiple different simplified signal models for both direct and gluino-mediated top squark production. Discussion is also given to work on the CMS Level-1 Trigger Menu, both as part of the Menu Team and on a project to incorporate a neural network into the trigger menu.