Kiyoshi Masui

Professor Masui studied engineering physics at Queen’s University in Canada and did his undergraduate thesis in experimental astroparticle physics. He received his PhD in Physics in 2013 from the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) at the University of Toronto. For his graduate work he led one of the first radio surveys to use hydrogen to map large-scale structure beyond the local universe. He then moved to the University of British Columbia as a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Global Scholar and subsequently a CITA National Fellow. He joined the MIT Department of Physics as Assistant Professor in 2018.

Professor Masui’s Synoptic Radio Lab works with wide-field, radio-wavelength sky surveys to establish new ways to observe the Universe. These include developing the technique of hydrogen intensity mapping for rapidly surveying large volumes of space, and exploiting the recently-discovered phenomena of fast radio bursts (FRBs) as probes of the Universe’s contents. This work includes creating digital instrumentation for radio telescopes, developing algorithms for analyzing observational data, and making theoretical predictions for the signals we should be looking for.