My research focused on a particular type of neutron star called a pulsar, which emits radio waves like a lighthouse. As the beam sweeps across our telescope, it shows up as a pulse of radio energy (hence the name pulsar).

By observing these radio pulses, I have studied a special family of pulsars called rotating radio transients (RRATs). I also specialized in how the interstellar medium (ISM), the gas and dust that floats around space, affects the radio signals from the pulsars.

As a previous member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) Collaboration, I helped utilize an array of pulsars across the sky (or pulsar timing array) to detect gravitational waves - ripples in space-time, that are emitted by supermassive black hole binary systems. My research as part of NANOGrav had two focuses:

  1. Timing the pulsars, a process where we determine when the pulses arrived at the telescopes and then modeling and predicting when the next ones would arrive.
  2. Studying how the ISM affects the signals and adds noise to the data and trying to model and mitigate those effects.

I was also interested in searching for new pulsars, particularly in globular clusters. These are dense clusters of stars that are known to host large populations of millisecond pulsars (which make a full rotation in less than 30 ms!) and potentially other interesting objects, like intermediate-mass black holes.

More specifically, before I left academia, my research involved:

  1. Helping to develop and write a new pulsar timing data analysis pipeline for NANOGrav, which will be used to curate a data set to detect gravitational waves.
  2. Writing and developing the Pulsar Signal Simulator, a Python-based software package that can simulate a pulsar signal from emission at the pulsar, through the ISM, observation by the telescope, and out in a standard data format.
  3. Using the Pulsar Signal Simulator to explore the covariances between different frequency-dependent effects, like pulsar dispersion, pulse profile evolution, and pulse scattering by the ISM. These studies can help determine sources of noise in the pulsar timing data and determine how accurate the pulsar timing models we find are.
  4. Searching globular clusters for new millisecond pulsar systems.

You can find a list of my publications at this ADS link.