Sarah Burke-spolaor
Assistant Professor at West Virginia University
Morgantown, West Virginia, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSarah Burke-Spolaor is an Assistant Professor and observational radio astronomer with 11 years of experience specializing in black holes, gravitational waves, pulsar timing, and fast radio transient searches. Her career spans academia and major observatories—developing fast-sampling systems at the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array as an NRAO Jansky Fellow and conducting postdoctoral research at JPL and Caltech—bringing instrument-building skills together with theory and data analysis. She leads efforts to detect and time pulsars and search for signatures of supermassive binary black holes, translating complex signal-processing challenges into robust observing systems. Based in Morgantown, WV, she combines teaching with high-impact observational programs and a background in supercomputing from her PhD, enabling scalable analysis of large radio datasets. An understated strength is her blend of hands-on instrumentation development and astrophysical interpretation, making her adept at moving ideas from concept to telescope.
11 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Astronomy, Physics, Film, BS, Astronomy, Physics, Film at Haverford CollegePhD, Astrophysics and Supercomputing, PhD, Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology
Github Skills (18)
filterbank7
energy6
injection5
random-walk5
snl-applications4
python4
data-analysis4
reader3
acceleration2
simulation2
synthesis1
wave1
astrophysics1
astronomy1
skeleton1
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
thepetabyteproject/tpp
Nov 2022 - Mar 2025
The Petabyte Project pipeline
Contributions:1 review, 10 PRs, 111 pushes in 2 years 4 months
xiggystardust/vla-dispatcher
Sep 2015 - Oct 2016
Contributions:26 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 1 month
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.