Kyle McGregor

Kyle is originally from Canton, New York. He is working with Dr. Duncan Lorimer on Population syntheses of pulsars and fast radio bursts.  

The CHIME telescope in Canada has revealed a large and growing population of FRBs, some of which have been observed to repeat. His project has been to write a code to construct a population of repeaters from first principles and simulate a mock CHIME observing campaign of them. They use this to help us constrain the detectability of underlying populations by CHIME, and test assumptions about the sample they have observed.

What attracted you to this REU program?

"Coming from a small liberal arts school, I wanted to get the feel for working at a larger institution. I also wanted to become exposed to how large-scale international collaborations, such as CHIME and NANOGrav, operate and approach research work."

Most surprising thing about Morgantown/the REU program?

"The weather really is "almost heaven". It isn't really too hot or too cold much of the summer."

"I really enjoyed weekly pulsar group meetings! WVU has a world-class department for studying radio transients, and it was neat to learn about what everyone was working on."

How do you plan to use this experience in the future?

"I've learned a lot about my work ethic and how to approach research work. I'd love to continue working with radio transients and astrophysical populations in the future, looking towards graduate school and beyond."