Prof. Marco Cavaglia, Professor of Physics at Missouri University
I got the chance to speak to Prof. Marco Cavaglia, a data analyst of the LIGO collaboration and a professor of Physics at the University of Missouri. Dr Cavaglia spoke to me about his role as part of LIGO as well as how the data gathered from the interferometers are cleaned to look for astrophysical signals.
This episode I spoke to Dr Cavaglia about what the LIGO collaboration is and how it operates, as well as some of the details of the interferometers. He also spoke about the kinds of data cleaning a data analyst such as himself needs to perform of the LIGO data to actually find gravitational wave signals. I also asked him a little about his role teaching and some advice he might give to high school students looking to pursue astrophysics.