I am Deepthi Gorthi, a graduate student in the Astronomy Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

I am interested in radio astronomy, a branch of astrophysics that uses radio wavelength light to study the properties of stars, galaxies and planets. Radio telescopes, unlike their optical counterparts, look like giant (or tiny) TV dishes and operate much like televisions. The key difference is that the signal astronomers are looking for, is orders-of-magnitude smaller than TV or FM signals.

Radio telescopes require a lot of signal processing to extract the astrophysical images from raw telescope data. My work, during graduate school, focussed on developing the firmware for this signal processing for the telescope called the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA).