Ayush Pandhi

Ayush Pandhi

PhD Candidate. Radio astronomer; magnetism, fast radio bursts, pulsars, and star formation.

Teaching

I am very passionate about science outreach and astronomy education. During my time as a PhD candidate, I have been a teaching assistant for seven different courses spanning a range of audiences and expertise levels, from introductory courses for non-astronomy majors to in depth astronomy specialist courses. In some of these courses, I have helped develop content for, and taught, tutorials sessions to classes of over a hundred students.

Outreach

Over the last 6 years in Toronto, I have been involved in many different astronomy outreach initiatives and have coordinated dozens of educational events. Some of these initatives include:

  1. The Astronomy and Space Exploration Society (ASX),

  2. Science Rendezvous U of T (SR UofT),

  3. Astro Tours (AstroTours).

I have also given multiple talks and interviews within the department, at schools across Canada, and for papers/radio/television focusing on the importance of communicating astronomy research and how to succeed in the academic environment of astrophysics.

Mentorship

I developed and conducted the graduate – undergraduate student mentorship program within my department to help upper year undergraduate students navigate the transition to graduate programs and/or industry. This program has been successfully running in the department since Fall 2020 and has approximately 50 participants per year. I myself have also directly mentored three undergraduate students and one graduate student during my time in the program.

Supervision

So far, I have supervised two undergraduate research project with students in the astronomy program at U of T. The first project was on the use of different statistical interpolation techniques to estimate continuous maps of Galactic Faraday rotation measures from extragalactic point sources. This work highlights the advantages and disadvantages of commonly used interpolation techniques in astronomy and serves as a primer for large-sky rotation measure catalogues expected from ongoing radio surveys such as POSSUM. It was recently submitted for publication to ApJ. Since September 2023, I have been supervising a second project which looks at high resolution dust polarization data to bridge the role of magnetic fields between cloud and core scales in the process of star formation.