I am Raghav Girgaonkar, I am pursuing my Master's in Physics from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Brownsville as a Graduate Research Assistant to Dr Soumya D. Mohanty. I completed my Bachelor's in Engineering Physics with a double major in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad in August 2021. At IIT Hyderabad I was a student mentor at Sunshine, the Counselling Cell of IIT Hyderabad. I was also a part of LitSoc the Literary Society of IIT Hyderabad and have contributed articles to Lexicon, the college magazine.
More recently, I was a Junior Research Fellow with UC Berkeley and Amity University Mumbai for the Breakthrough Listen Program from November 2021 to April 2022. Through this program I and 3 other fellows worked on setting up a SETI backend for the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Through this project, we were able to create a data pipeline for the GMRT which allows us to do narrowband SETI with the GMRT. In my free time, I enjoy playing and watching sports, cooking and (trying) to create and mix music.

My research interests are in the fields of pulsar, radio and gravitational-wave astronomy. I am also interested in developing hardware and software tools related to signal processing, instrumentation and machine learning for radio telescopes.
I am a member of the Indian Pulsar Timing Array Consortium (InPTA), now a part of the The International Pulsar Timing Array Collaboration. In my undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, I have worked at the InPTA to study millisecond pulsars, their Dispersion Measures and monitor changes in their profiles. The InPTA's primary goal is to detect the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background (SGWB) in the Nano-Hertz region. The InPTA uses the GMRT for radio observations of over 20 millisecond pulsars.
My current research focuses on Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) in India. Through a Junior Research Fellowship co-hosted by UC Berkeley and Amity University, Mumbai, I am part of a team building GPU accelerated pipelines for processing GMRT raw data to a format fit for SETI research. We plan to use GMRT for interferometric SETI and explore the possibility of injecting broadband signals into GMRT baseband data to simulate signals of interest.

Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, Pune

Schematic of a CME event detected through InPTA pulsar dataset

The International Pulsar Timing Array Collaboration