When I first started as a freshman at Cal Poly, I was drawn toward experimental astrophysics. With Dr. Jodi Christiansen, I analyzed data from the VERITAS telescopes to detect and study blazars in distant galaxies. We worked on algorithms in Python and Perl to help aid analysis of high energy, Cherenkov events that the telescopes detected. My analysis and work contributed to discovery of multiple blazars, including Blazar 3C 264 which was reported in the Astronomer’s Telegram (ATel #11436). I worked with international collaboration to analyze data from the VERITAS telescopes located in Arizona. I also improved the automation process for the source location analysis by automatically pulling source information from databases and running preliminary formatting and analysis
