Hi! I'm Kaitlyn (Kait) Shin (she/her/hers).

Currently, I'm a 6th year PhD candidate and NSF Graduate Research Fellow at MIT Astrophysics. I work with Prof. Kiyoshi Masui and the CHIME/FRB Collaboration to learn all about Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

Research

⭐ I think a lot about science involving large numbers of FRBs -- e.g., where do they reside, how are their brightnesses distributed, how can they be used to probe the Universe? -- while endeavoring to correct for observational selection effects as best as possible. Some code and basic data products from my work can be found here. (If you think I should have uploaded some data products but didn't, please let me know!)
🪠 I contributed significantly to the CHIME/FRB Catalog 1 efforts, and am actively working on internal infrastructure to ensure robust populations-level analyses for future catalog efforts and for CHIME/FRB Outriggers. (My current technical focus is on pipelining the baseband pipeline for large-scale processing, but also check out the injections system and its data release!)
🔭 I also use the Magellan telescope (and others!) to characterize host galaxy candidates of FRBs.
👷🏻‍♀️ I briefly helped commission and deploy the digital hardware for the CHIME/FRB Outrigger telescope at GBO.
📚 A list of papers I have (co-)authored can be found here.

Outreach and Service

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

Selected Internet appearances

2023-05-23: Study doubles the number of known repeating fast radio bursts (MIT News, article)
2022-08-02: Inferring the FRB Distance and Energy Distributions with CHIME/FRB (FRB 2022 at the IAUGA, talk)
2021-09-07: What are Fast Radio Bursts? (The Cosmic Companion, podcast)
2021-07-28: FRB Population Distributions from the First CHIME/FRB Catalog (FRB 2021, talk)
2021-06-10: Hundreds of mysterious fast radio bursts detected in space (CNN, article)
2021-06-09: CHIME telescope detects more than 500 mysterious fast radio bursts in its first year of operation (MIT News, article)
2020-06-26: A Mysterious Rhythm Is Coming From Another Galaxy (The Atlantic, article)
2018-06-18: Honorary Undergraduate Speaker, Stanford Physics Commencement 2018 (talk)

Excited about FRBs? Questions about research and/or outreach I've done? Feel free to get in touch at kshin[at]mit[dot]edu.