Overview
Hello! I’m Sashabaw (Sash, for short), and I became a graduate student at Cornell in the fall of 2021. I study subsecond transient radio signals likely originating from galactic and extra-galactic neutron stars and the interaction of those signals with ionized media in the interstellar medium and elsewhere.
I received my B.S. in Physics and Applied Mathematics from Hillsdale College. I helped construct the fifth Low-Frequency All-Sky Monitor (LoFASM V) radio telescope array and wrote Python scripts to streamline the viewing and cataloging efforts of the incoming telescope data. I also developed numerical methods for reducing eccentricity in simulated black hole binary mergers using post-Newtonian theory up to 3.5 order during a summer REU with Prof. David Neilsen of BYU. This NSF-funded research was the focus of my undergrad thesis.
My thesis work as a Ph.D. candidate with Professors James Cordes and Shami Chatterjee is on the interaction of coherent sub-second radio emission with different ionized environments between the emission source and detectors. These propagative effects contain important information on the distribution and structure of baryons within the Milky Way and extra-galactic environments. Equally important is estimating the form of the emission at the source by developing tools to disentangle the intrinsic emission from distortions caused by the environment.
Much of my research focuses on Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) from extra-galactic sources and similar radio emission from Galactic neutron stars. I am developing machine learning algorithms for pre-processing and post-processing radio telescope data in the search for FRBs. I also utilize traditional detection methods and search for evidence of propagation effects in individual burst structure.
I am a member of the Galactic Radio Explorer Telescope (GReX) project and was in charge of the GReX terminal deployment at Cornell University in 2024. I have also helped with deployments at Harvard University and am working on hardware and software developments for future stations! My current focus within GReX is on developing a ground-up population-based method for constraining the rate of FRB-like events within the Milky Way and connecting that rate with the inferred all-sky rate of FRBs.
Outside of astronomy, I enjoy reading fantasy books, playing board games and MTG with friends, spending time outdoors, playing the violin, and acquiring trinkets for my bookshelf.