Ross Jennings
Astronomy | McLaughlin Group
Biography
Ross Jennings completed his Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy at Carleton College in 2015, and received his PhD from Cornell University in 2021, advised by Professor Jim Cordes. Since 2018, Ross has been a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory forGravitational Waves (NANOGrav), a pulsar timing array, which seeks to detect gravitational waves at nanohertz frequencies by monitoring the times of arrival of pulses emitted by a large number of millisecond pulsars. His contributions to the collaboration include producing pulsar timing solutions, contributing to the development of pulsar timing software, and coordinating observations at the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). As part of his PhD thesis, Ross studied several phenomena that contribute to noise in pulsar timing measurements, including pulse shape changes and small bodies in orbit around a pulsar. Currently, he is helping to develop a cyclic spectroscopy backend for the GBT, which will contribute to our understanding of the scattering of pulsar emission by the interstellar medium (ISM) by making possible new measurements of the ISM impulse response function.