Outreach
Education and outreach activities that I have participated in.
ERIRA (Educational Research in Radio Astronomy)
Since 2018 (I was a participant in 2017), I’ve been an educator/coordinator for ERIRA (Educational Research in Radio Astronomy). ERIRA is a week-long intensive astronomy research program that takes place at the Green Bank Radio Observatory (formerly NRAO), WV during the summer, founded and led by my undergraduate advisor Prof. Dan Reichart, for almost 30 years. During ERIRA, I mentor (mostly college) students in topics such as physical modeling, computer programming and machine learning, data science and machine learning, and other skills important to astronomy. ERIRA is one of my favorite times of the year, and is the greatest example of rapid collaboration and productivity that I’ve ever been a part of.
Group project topics that I have mentored have include:
- Using a 40-ft radio telescope to (1) image the arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, and use their Doppler-shifted observed frequencies to infer our height above the plane of the Galaxy.
- Using a 40-ft radio telescope to image the Milky Way’s North Polar Spur and the Orion Nebula, and analyze and resolve polarized light and resolved structures.
- Training an artificial neural network to classify images of galaxies from scratch.
