I am an astrophysicist studying the Universe at radio wavelengths. I combine instrumentation, observations, machine learning, and simulations to study Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), which are brief, mysterious flashes of radio waves from galaxies billions of lightyears away. Beyond studying their enigmatic physical origin(s), I have developed new ways of using FRBs as a probe of cosmology. Specifically, I have used the time-delay of FRBs (plasma dispersion) to find the otherwise-unobservable matter in the Universe. That work resolved the decades-old “Missing Baryon Problem”. To push this idea even further, I am building a new kind of radio telescope called the Coherent All-Sky Monitor (CASM). It will continuously image the entire radio sky at millisecond time resolution. I plan to scale CASM up to an industrial level, with tens of thousands of inexpensive dipole antennas acting as a single phased array, leveraged by exponential trends in computing (e.g., GPUs and fiber-optics).
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