kaitlyn shin | caltech astronomy

about me

Hi! I’m currently a postdoc at Caltech working with the DSA-2000 and CHIME/FRB collaborations. Previously, I did my PhD at MIT with Prof. Kiyoshi Masui.

My PhD work was with CHIME/FRB. I worked with Catalog 1, using our injections system to understand intrinsic FRB property distributions, as well as their energy and distance distributions. Some basic data products from that work can be found here. Despite my populations work, I am fond of some individual FRBs and what we can learn from them. I’ve also helped discover a few extremely active repeating FRB sources (e.g., FRB 20240114A and FRB 20240209A).

Nowadays, with CHIME/FRB, I maintain and lead our baseband localization pipeline efforts, and am currently leading our second baseband catalog effort (“BaseCat2”). (I made the main data products for BaseCat1 — check out the data here!)

research interests

Fast radio bursts (FRBs): discovering them, localizing them, following up their host galaxies, investigating their use as probes of diffuse matter… you name it, I’m (probably) interested in it!
Long-period radio transients: studying their multiwavelength behavior (especially optical + X-ray), and of course, also discovering more :)
Other weird things?: I’m involved with UV/O/IR time-domain surveys of globular clusters, hoping to identify some fun, weird radio transients with multi-wavelength counterparts.

📚 A list of papers I have (co-)authored can be found here.

other things

Throughout grad school I’ve been involved with Astrobites, Astronomy on Tap @Boston/Cambridge, MSRP, MIT physREFS. I’m particularly proud of these Astrobites pieces (a full list can be found here):