I am currently a Grote Reber Doctoral Research Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). I conduct my research at the NRAO Technology Lab in Charlottesville, Virginia under supervision of Dr. Richard Bradley and Dr. Jack Burns. My research focus on developing and testing a ground-based single dipole antenna radiometer to be utilized for the 21-cm Global Signal Experiment. I am directly involved in the front-end electronics, the receiver, the data-acquisition hardware and software, the signal processing pipeline, as well as field deployment of the system in National Radio Quiet Zone at Green Bank of West Virginia. The ultimate goal is to deploy our system to either Western Australia or/and the Karoo Region of South Africa, where the radio frequency interference (RFI) at the low radio frequency regime (< 150MHz) is minimal.
Previously, I was working for Dr. John Stocke and Dr. Charles Danforth by using C.O.S. and other UV experiments to study low-z Damped Lyman-alpha Absorption Systems (DLAs). By selecting pairs of AGNs (within 20 degree) from opposite sides of the Milky Way, absorption of the AGN photons by the Galactic medium are detected. Combining the absoprtion profiles from both side of the Disk, an average absorption profile of the Galactic Disk can be constructed. This "antipodal" survey will give us insights of understanding external DLAs, to name a few: column density, metalicity, dynamical properties, etc. Besides DLA, I also use C.O.S. UV and single-dish radio data to determine a correlation between synchrotron luminosities and outflow velocities of the Board Absorption Line Quasars (BALQSOs) for another project. My interests include high-z large scale structure formation, epoch of reionization (EoR), first star formation, intergalactic medium (IGM) absorption, and low radio frequency instrumentation. As an undergrad, I worked for Dr. Peng Oh in developing image processing technique for 21 cm signal tomography of the early universe, which will be observed by future low radio frequency interferometer array
Selected Recent Publications:
Spekkens, K., Mason, B. S., Aguirre, J. E. , Nhan, B., 2013. "A Deep Search for Extended Radio Continuum Emission from Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies: Implications for Particle Dark Matter", ApJ 773 61 doi:10.1088/0004-637X/773/1/61