Hi there! My name is Danny Price, and I'm an Operations Scientist for the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), and adjunct Senior Lecturer at Curtin University, as part of the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Perth, Western Australia.
My background is in radio astronomy: building instruments for technosignature searches, pulsars & FRBs, and 21-cm cosmology.
From 2019-2024, I was the Australian Project Scientist for the Breakthrough Listen initiative: the most comprehensive search for technosignatures ever undertaken (SETI). Listen is using the largest telescopes in the world to systematically search for artificial signals of unknown origin. I worked on the digital signal processing systems and data analysis pipelines, and running the science program on the Parkes 'Murriyang' telescope in Australia.
I also previously worked on the Large Aperture Experiment to Detect the Dark Ages, or LEDA. We built a precision radiometer system alonside a 256-antenna array in Owens Valley, California. The LEDA project is looking for the faint signal from Hydrogen in the early Universe, as the first stars and galaxies started to form.
A LEDA all-sky image at 47 MHz (data reduced by Stephen Bourke).
At Swinburne University, as part of the UTMOST-2D project, we upgraded the Molonglo telescope, to convert it into a Fast Radio Burst detection and localization machine (UTMOST). Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are rare and enigmatic astrophyical events that last only a few milliseconds. They appear to originate from billions of light years away; how and why they occur remains an outstanding mystery that astronomers are trying to solve.
I have worked extensively on digital instrumentation: designing and implementing signal processing systems for radio telescopes. I previously worked a lot with FPGAs and I'm part of the CASPER collaboration. I've helped build instruments at the Parkes (HIPSR), Owen's Valley (LEDA), Medicina (BEST-2), and Tidbinbilla (TAMS) observatories.
D-PAD was a 16-element aperture array that I built as part of my PhD project.
