Hi! My name is Vishnu Gade. I am a physics major and CS minor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am fascinated by the problems of Cosmology and Gravity and hope to pursue a gradaute career in those areas.
Starting in the summer of 2021, I worked for a year with Dr. Ken D. Olum at Tufts University's Institute of Cosmology studying the effect of gravitational-backreaction on cusp formation in cosmic strings. This past summer I worked with Dr. Vishal Baibhav and Dr. Vicky Kalogera at Northwestern University's Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics implmenting the adaptive importance sampling algorithm STROOPWAFEL into the POSYDON binary stellar population synthesis code developed at CIERA to improve sampling of rare binaries.
Much of my research experience so far has been focused around writing code for simulations. But that is, I am excited to continue my work with Dr. Baibhav and gain exposure to the data analytics side of astronomy as we use the tool I built for POSYDON to aid our study of supernova kicks in Low-Mass X-ray Binaries.