My interest in radio astronomy stems from coursework, and I have had exciting opportunities to explore that interest in a research setting. Below are my current projects in the field.
I am currently at MIT Haystack Observatory, continuing work I started at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan with Kazunori Akiyama (MIT), Shiro Ikeda (ISM), Kotaro Moriyama (ITP), and Mareki Honma (NAOJ), on developing a new Julia-based software suite of regularized maximum likelihood (RML) techniques for EHT image reconstruction, as well as exploring RML EHT movie reconstruction with optimal transport distances as a regularizer.
A report on our findings for the optimal transport dynamic regularizer can be found here (for now only available in Japanese). My poster, presented at the Black Hole Explorer Japan Workshop, is available here. Our Julia RML package can be found here.
I was a summer 2023 REU student at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, NM, where I worked with Juergen Ott (NRAO), Brian Svoboda (NRAO), and David Meier (NMT) on determining the kinematics and properties of molecular clouds in the Milky Way Galactic bar region using ALMA observations. We find that 1) turbulent pressure is inhibiting star formation and heating clouds in the Galactic bar, 2) ammonia and formaldehyde trace different gas components in molecular clouds, and 3) the CO-to-H2 X-factor for molecular clouds in the bar is significantly lower than the typical Galactic value, likely due to their reduced optical depth. My final report is available here. Our paper is under review with The Astrophysical Journal.