I've had the pleasure to work under the mentorship of two very bright individuals in their labs my freshman and sophomore year. As a freshman, I was interested in exploring space and was given the opportunity to conduct research with Dr. Alvise Raccanelli, a cosmologist, in assisting in preliminary data analysis for the Evolutionary Map of the Universe project. The project seeks to conduct full sky surveys on radio sources, such as galaxies some signals were also detected to have occurred closely (relative to cosmic time) to the occurrence of the Big Bang (so cool)!!! The project relied on data from the new ASKAP telescope. I complied the data from CLASS, a C++ / Python hybrid code to obtain redshift information on the radio sources, and using this data wrote my own Matlab code that performed statistical analysis on the data to obtain its Fisher information and compare the projects efficiency to similar projects. My calculations influenced a $200 million project.
My sophomore year, wanting to learn more about the engineering mechanisms behind space exploration, I worked in Dr. Rajat Mittal's Flow Physics and Computation Lab on a topic related to aerodynamics in insect (fruit flies) flight. The goal was to understand the mechanisms behind their flight in order to find bio-inspired solutions to insect mitigation techniques. I assisted in setting up and conducting tests critical to the functioning of the lab, such as tethering insects and setting up equipment for the high-speed videography. I improved the tethering system used to suspend the insects in place during the experiments. I wrote a Matlab code compatible with Arduino that incorporated and controlled all the various electrical components necessary for data collection to occur.