Welcome to the new site
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Welcome! This is the new home for my research, publications, and software.
Blog & News
2026
2025
Brightest fast radio burst ever seen lets researchers pinpoint origin with unprecedented precision
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Using newly deployed telescope arrays, our team identified the brightest fast radio burst ever detected — in a nearby galaxy — and localized it with unprecedented precision, challenging prior assumptions about where and how these bursts arise.
2024
UC Santa Cruz research will harness advanced AI to better measure, predict climate-change impacts
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I am leading a UC Santa Cruz project that combines cutting-edge AI with large satellite and in-situ datasets to better estimate the heat content of the upper ocean and detect ocean fronts — improving our ability to measure and predict the impacts of climate change.
UC Santa Cruz astrophysicists honored for advancing research on the mysterious FRB
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Along with the CHIME/FRB Collaboration, I shared a Marcel Grossmann Award recognizing the detection and comprehensive analysis of a large population of fast radio bursts — a major step in turning FRBs into routine cosmological tools.
2023
Record-breaking fast radio burst is most distant ever detected
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A global team I contributed to detected an eight-billion-year-old fast radio burst — the most ancient and distant yet localized — using telescopes across three continents, pushing FRBs further than ever as probes of the cosmos.
2022
With Pivot Fellowship, astronomer J. Xavier Prochaska turns to oceanography
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A Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship is supporting my move into oceanography, applying the data-science and spectroscopy methods I developed in astronomy to problems in physical and biological oceanography — including a fellowship year at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
2021
Astronomers track down fast radio bursts to galaxies’ spiral arms
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Using the Hubble Space Telescope, our team pinpointed the locations of five fast radio bursts to the spiral arms of their host galaxies — pointing to young, massive stars (and magnetars) as a likely origin of these brief, powerful blasts.
Astronomer J. Xavier Prochaska honored for top research paper in Science
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Together with my coauthors, I was awarded the prestigious Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for our landmark Science paper describing a fast radio burst from a massive galaxy.
2020
Universe’s ‘missing matter’ finally found in the space between galaxies
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Using localized fast radio bursts as cosmic probes, an international team detected the long-sought “missing” baryons spread through the space between galaxies, solving a decades-old puzzle in the cosmic census of ordinary matter. The result was published in Nature.
2019
Galaxy found to float in a tranquil sea of halo gas
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By analyzing the signal from a localized fast radio burst that passed through the halo of a massive foreground galaxy, our team characterized the diffuse gas and magnetic field of that halo — demonstrating a new and transformative technique for probing the gas around galaxies. The work appeared in Science.