I am a Canadian astrophysicist working at the California Institute of Technology, where I am a Tolman Prize Postdoctoral Fellow. Prior to Caltech, I was a Postdoc at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam. My research is focused on Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), a mysterious new class of extragalactic explosions. In general I use a variety of statistical, theoretical, and radio astronomical tools to study the long-wavelength sky. I also work on the intersection of AI and astro
Fast Radio Bursts were discovered serendipitously in 2007 with the Parkes telescope in Australia. They are millisecond blasts of radio waves, coming from external galaxies billions of light-years away. Though there appear to be thousands of FRBs across the full sky each day, we still do not know what produces them. But we do have some clues. Their tremendous energetics and short duration imply that they must come from extreme environments, such as the magnetospheres of neutron stars , from the collision of
Producing an image of the radio sky from an interferometer is an ill-posed deconvolution problem that astronomers have worked on for half a century. The problem is made harder on next-generation telescopes whose raw data rates exceed the total internet traffic of most countries. To solve this problem, I have built a machine learning based approach that builds off of recent advances in the use of neural networks for computer vision. We call this method "POLISH". I did this in collaboration with computer scie