About Scott

The discovery plot of the first Fermi MSP, a highly accelerated black widow, J2214+3000.

I'm a tenured astronomer working on all things pulsar or neutron star related at NRAO. I search for exotic pulsars (such as binary and/or millisecond pulsars or MSPs) and then time them, using their atomic clock-like rotational characteristics to probe as much basic physics or astrophysics as possible. I've been at NRAO for over 20 years.

Prior to that, I was a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University, and before that, I received my PhD from the Harvard Astronomy Department.. If you are interested (or extremely bored), you can read my thesis here. I also did a 6-year stint in the U.S. Army as a Field Artillery officer after having attended West Point for my undergraduate education.

My interests include high-performance computing (particularly with respect to "Big Data"), digital instrumentation for radio astronomy, and advanced Fourier and DSP algorithms for time-domain data analysis. I do all of this stuff because pulsars are cool, and if we can find many more of them and time them much better, we'll be able to do a huge amount of basic physics with them. Examples include testing general relativity, probing matter at supra-nuclear density, and directly detecting and characterizing nHz-frequency gravitational waves. I work a lot (or have worked a lot) with the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), Arecibo (may it R.I.P.), Fermi, Chandra, and other major telescopes and observatories.

"Jacob's Ladder" on Table Mountain in S. Africa

PRESTO is the suite of pulsar search and analysis software (written in C and Python) that I wrote, maintain, and use. You can get it and some other software on github.

I've taught the UVA graduate Radio Astronomy Course (Astro5340) many times, and the lecture notes (written mostly by Jim Condon) are on the web as Essential Radio Astronomy. You can also buy the book!

I am one of the founding members of NANOGrav and was its Chair for four years (2018-2022).

Here is my CV and a short bio.

When I'm not doing pulsar stuff, I love to read, hike, mountain bike, downhill ski, and most of all, rock climb.