I am an incoming Physics MSc student at McGill University, focused on Astrophysics. I graduated from the University of Virginia (UVA) in May 2018 with bachelors degrees in Astronomy-Physics and Computer Science. While at McGill, I will be working in Vicky Kaspi's group on a project related to the upcoming CHIME radio telescope. I am also interested in mentoring and public outreach within astronomy.
While at UVA, I completed a number of small astronomical research projects ranging in subject from visible wavelength occultation observations (see this New York Times article about our recent mission to Senegal, my name is now "Brigitte Anderson") to XMM-Newton X-ray observations of galaxy clusters.
In the summer of 2015, I completed the Space Astronomy Summer Program at the Space Telescope Science Institute, where I coordinated with developers and scientific support staff to design and implement a user’s web-portal for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.
In the summer of 2016, I participated in an NSF REU at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Array Operations Center in Socorro, New Mexico. While there, I worked with Sarah Burke-Spolaor and Paul Demorest on various aspects of project Realfast, aimed at developing a commensal fast radio burst detection and localization system at the Very Large Array.
In the summer of 2017, I attended an NSF REU at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where I worked with Ian Stephens on a project related to testing a method for obtaining separate disk and envelope mass estimates from protostellar sources using unresolved interferometric data from the Submillimeter Array and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope.
During my last year at UVA, I completed my senior thesis with Scott Ransom. My thesis involved extending the existing PRESTO binary pulsar acceleration search to account for orbital ``jerk''. For more details, view my published paper at this link. The code for the jerk search is available on GitHub.