SURP Student Spotlight: Gurman Sachdeva

Gurman is an incoming Astronomy PhD student at UofT, where he just completed his bachelor’s with an Astronomy & Physics Specialist, Computer Science Minor, and Math Minor. His main research interests lie within radio astronomy, instrumentation, and the wide variety of unimaginably powerful astrophysical transients. He is also an avid teacher, having amassed nearly 1500 combined hours of TAing and tutoring. Even a caveman would enjoy looking up at the stars, and Gurman’s other interests similarly exhibit little deviation from his ancient ancestors’. As often as possible, he enjoys hiking, camping, swimming, biking, and road trips, as well as weightlifting, astrophotography, and video games like Minecraft. 

What made you decide to participate in SURP?

I applied to SURP because doing a focused project in the summer after graduating sounded like the perfect opportunity to explore my own research interests in preparation for my graduate program starting this fall. The hope was that it would help ease my transition to grad school, allowing me to spend less time in first year deciding on a project, and more time actually doing research. 

What is your favourite thing about SURP?

Though I’ve done a couple other research projects, I’ve especially been enjoying SURP because it allows me to dedicate all of my effort to the project without being spread thin by courses or part-time work. This maximizes the impact of my research despite the relatively short timeframe. Thanks to this freedom, I’ve also been able to enrich my learning by attending several weekly meetings with members of the collaboration I’m working within, as well as a week-long, field-wide conference (FRB2025) where I learned – quite frankly – more than I can hope to remember… 

Can you tell us about your research project?

I am helping complete the commissioning of the Hat Creek Outrigger (HCO) telescope, one of three mini-CHIME telescopes whose synergy (through very-long-baseline interferometry) will enable CHIME/FRB to localize fast radio bursts (FRBs) to a precision of tens of milliarcseconds. To be clear, that’s like standing on the Moon, staring at the entire Earth*, detecting a few-millisecond flash of radio much fainter than that from a cellphone starting a phone call, and being able to confidently state from which city block it originated! (*Except the actual telescopes stare at a patch of sky ~100 times larger than the Earth appears from the Moon!!) In particular, my work characterizes the noise profiles of HCO’s signal chains and the overall instrument to determine how faint a signal they could actually detect – because the noisier the instrument, the brighter a signal must be for it to register, and FRBs are pretty faint by the time they reach Earth. I’m also identifying underperforming components to facilitate debugging efforts when I visit the telescope site later this summer!

Can you explain how SURP has been different from your undergrad work?

A boon of SURP is that I can dedicate all of my time to the project, enabling a much deeper exploration and more fulfilling research experience than projects concurrent with course-filled semesters. I am also lucky to work in (objectively best astro lab at UofT,) the UTRAIN lab, where I have insightful daily conversations and frequent meetings with lab members, including other undergrads, grad students, postdocs, and professors. As with coursework, I’m picking up a lot of info; but it’s through a fresh medium, and beyond just learning how to conduct rigorous research, I can honestly say I’m helping advance the frontiers of astronomy! 

What are your plans for the future?

I will begin my PhD in astronomy at UofT this fall, continuing to work on my current project or something adjacent. I also hope to further explore hydrodynamics simulations and possibly work on projects at the intersection of those and radio astronomy/FRB science (e.g. investigating FRB progenitor mechanisms). My ultimate aim is professorship, but who knows how long that’ll take? 

Tell us something fun about yourself unrelated to SURP!

After weeks of making fun of online cavedivers amongst my friends, we recently took a road trip visiting Metcalfe Rock (near Collingwood), found a cave, and climbed in without a second thought. Probably not the safest thing I’ve ever done, but it was no Nutty Putty, and we actually had a lot of fun – no surprise considering my other caveman hobbies. We even found a thick deposit of ice in an area that just barely evades direct sunlight (in the middle of summer)! We didn’t get to explore things thoroughly though, and plan to return with headlamps. P.S. check out my website for neat pictures including astrophotos and some other cool stuff: http://individual.utoronto.ca/gurman/

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