ABOUT ME
I am a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the department of Astronomy & Astrophysics. I received my bachelors degree in honours physics at McGill University where I completed my undergraduate thesis under the supervision of Vicky Kaspi. Prior to starting my PhD, I spent a year working within the CHIME/FRB collaboration under the supervision of Vicky Kaspi and Kiyoshi Masui.
Outside of academia I love to travel, go on road trips and camp! A life goal of mine is to visit as many radio telescope in the world as I can and collect a collectors patch from every national park in Canada and the USA. If you’re curious about my progress, you can checkout my photos page.
My Research
Very broadly speaking, I am interested in everything radio astronomy related. My background is in radio instrumentation and I’ve played a major role in commissioning the CHIME/FRB outrigger telescopes. Along the way, I’ve developed an interest in fast radio bursts (FRBs) and using wide-field very-long-baseline-interferometry (VLBI) to localise them to their host environments. More recently, I have become interested in the link between FRBs, their persistent radio counterparts and supernovae. As part of my PhD, I aim to enable VLBI imaging with the CHIME outriggers to search for persistent radio counterparts for FRBs that are well-localised by the outriggers.
I am currently supervised by Juan Mena-Parra, commissioning the CHIME/FRB outrigger telescopes to enable the localisation of thousands of FRBs to sub 50 milliarcseconds using VLBI. Additionally, I am using the European VLBI Network (EVN) to explore the link between supernovae and FRBs on VLBI scales, co-supervised by Juan and by Kenzie Nimmo.
Radio Instrumentation
Fast Radio Bursts
Supernovae
Persistent Radio Sources
VLBI
Radio Imaging
My Publications
Co-Authored
[5] The CHIME/FRB Collaboration + 61 co-authors including Lazda, M. (2023). Updating the first CHIME/FRB catalog of fast radio bursts with baseband data (submitted to ApJ) [arXiv: 2311.00111]
[4] Cassanelli, T., Leung, C., Sanghavi, P. + 49 co-authors including Lazda, M. (2023). A fast radio burst localized at detection to a galactic disk using very long baseline interferometry (submitted to Nature Astronomy) [arXiv: 2307.09502]
[3] Sanghavi, P., Leung, C., + 14 co-authors including Lazda, M. (2023). TONE: A CHIME/FRB Outrigger Pathfinder for localizations of Fast Radio Bursts using Very Long Baseline Interferometry. (submitted to Journal of Astrophysical Instrumentation) [arXiv: 2304.10534]
[2] CHIME/FRB Collaboration + 58 co-authors including Lazda, M. (2023). CHIME/FRB Discovery of 25 Repeating Fast Radio Burst Sources, ApJ, 947, 83C [arXiv:2301.08762]
[1] Cook, A. + 27 co-authors including Lazda, M. (2023). An FRB Sent Me a DM: Constraining the Electron Column of the Milky Way Halo with Fast Radio Burst Dispersion Measures from CHIME/FRB, ApJ, 946, 58C [arXiv:2301.03502]