PhD student · Pulsar astronomer · Globular Cluster Pulsars, Double Neutron Stars & Gravitation Waves
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy · COMPACT project

🌐 Website • ✉️ Email • 📚 Google Scholar • 🧾 ORCID • 🛰️ COMPACT • 𝕏 / Twitter

I work at the intersection of pulsar astronomy, gravitational-wave physics, and software for radio telescopes.

• 🎓 PhD student in the Fundamental Physics in Radio Astronomy division at MPIfR, Bonn, as part of the COMPACT project.
• 🔭 I search for and time binary pulsars in globular clusters, and help probe the nanohertz gravitational-wave background with pulsar timing arrays.
• 🇮🇳 Previously: Dual BS–MS in Physics at IISER Kolkata, working with the Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) on nanohertz GW searches.

When I’m not chasing neutron stars, I’m usually hacking on pulsar pipelines, timing tools, and cluster workflows.

• Binary pulsars in globular clusters
• Pulsar Timing Arrays & nanohertz gravitational-wave background
• Wideband timing techniques & dispersion measure (DM) estimation
• Jitter, scattering, and all the ways the ISM tries to mess with timing residuals
• High-performance data processing for radio astronomy (GPUs, clusters, containers)

A few recent papers I’ve co-authored (see my Google Scholar / ORCID for the full list):

1. Low-frequency pulse-jitter measurement with the uGMRT I: PSR J0437–4715
   T. Kikunaga et al., incl. F. Kareem
   Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia (PASA), 2024
   ADS • arXiv

2. Multiband extension of the wideband timing technique
   A. K. Paladi et al., incl. F. Kareem
   Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), 2024
   ADS • Journal

3. Improving DM estimates using low-frequency scatter-broadening estimates
   J. Singha et al., incl. F. Kareem
   MNRAS, 2024
   ADS • Journal

4. Comparing recent Pulsar Timing Array results on the nanohertz stochastic gravitational-wave background
   G. Agazie et al., incl. F. Kareem
   The Astrophysical Journal, 2024
   ADS • arXiv

5. The second data release from the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) – II–V series
   J. Antoniadis et al., incl. F. Kareem
   Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2023–2024
   EPTA DR2 overview

💡 You can keep this section short and point people to Google Scholar / ORCID for a complete, always-up-to-date list.

Languages & numerics

• Python (scientific stack: numpy, scipy, pandas, astropy, matplotlib)
• Rust (data processing tools like rusty_candypicker)
• Bash, a bit of Fortran & Mathematica where the legacy code demands it
• C / C++ / CUDA ( Rarely )

Radio astronomy / pulsar stack

• Pulsar searching & folding: PEASOUP, Effelsberg Radio Telescope, uGMRT / GMRT backends, filterbank handling
• Timing & noise analysis: TEMPO / TEMPO2, PTA analysis pipelines, Gaussian-process-based noise models
• Pulsar Timing Array collaborations: InPTA, EPTA, IPTA

Data & infrastructure

• High-performance computing: SLURM / Condor clusters, multi-GPU workflows
• Docker & Singularity for reproducible pipelines
• Nextflow and workflow tooling (e.g. work on the COMPACT / ERC pipelines)
• Data visualisation & publication-quality plotting

A few repositories that reflect what I actually do with all this data:

• 🔍 elden-ring Nextflow pipeline to process, clean, search and fold dada files, filterbanks and fits files for pulsar searches.

• 🦀 rusty_candypicker
  Rust tool to parse, cluster, and shortlist pulsar candidates from Peasoup XML — with options for RFI birdie removal & CSV tooling.

• 🧵 TimeLoom
  “Weaving” pulsar archive files into tight timing solutions.

• 🌌 3d-gc-distribution
  Playing with 3D distributions of globular clusters in the Milky Way.

• 🧪 pulsar_docker & friends
  Containers and tooling for pulsar software stacks (peasoup, dedisp, etc.) on modern GPU architectures.

I enjoy:

• collaborating on pulsar search / timing pipelines (Rust, Python, Nextflow, Docker, GPUs),
• cross-PTA work on gravitational waves at nanohertz frequencies,
• mentoring students who want to get into radio astronomy, PTA science, or scientific Python.

If any of that overlaps with what you’re doing, feel free to reach out via email or X — I’m always happy to chat about pulsars, PTAs, or how to keep your cluster jobs from exploding. 🙂