Ananay Sethi is a first-year graduate student pursuing a Master of Science Degree in Physics with a specialization in Astrophysics at New Mexico Tech. Ananay currently works as a graduate Teaching Assistant in the Physics Department. His research with Dr. Peter Hofner primarily focuses on observational astrophysics in the radio wavelengths. Since August 2022, Ananay has been researching High-Mass Star Formation, through observing protostellar regions and their water vapor masers with data taken using the Karl Jansky Very Large Array.
Ananay is a recipient of the LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Programme for 2023-2025, where he will attend 6 week-long programs over the course of 2 years and will be trained in dealing with Big Data from the newly built Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile.
In his first year at New Mexico Tech, Ananay has participated in various workshops and conferences across campus. He was selected to attend the VLA Data Reduction Workshop at the NRAO DSOC in October 2022. In April 2023, he presented his research at the New Mexico Tech Student Research Symposium (SRS), and he is going to be presenting his work at the international level with the upcoming American Astronomical Society (AAS) Meeting in Albuquerque in June 2023.
Ananay has a Bachelor of Science in Astronomy and Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). At UIUC, under the guidance of his advisor Dr. Tony Wong, Ananay worked as an undergraduate research associate member of the CARMA-EDGE research group. He worked on building a software program to serve as the group’s observational toolkit to be used to automate the logging of observations using the Green Bank Telescope. He also worked on modeling galaxies using various Python packages in the near universe to determine their star-formation rates. Ananay wrote a paper with Dr. Wong on the aforementioned topic, and the paper is currently in review.
While pursuing his undergraduate degree, he also worked in various internships, ranging from working as a software developer and content editor for the Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, to working as a Data Scientist for Humana as part of an internship, as well as working as an undergraduate TA for 100-level astronomy courses.
Outside of astrophysics, Ananay’s interests revolve around music, books, and traveling. If he has free time, he is either reading a book, or practicing the drums on his practice pad and busy on his laptop making beats on FL Studio, or if it’s a long weekend, he’s out to different parts of the state exploring beautiful New Mexico!
