Outreach
I consider science communication to be an integral part of my professional life. Here is a sample of some of my physics and astronomy-related outreach activities.
Portable Planetarium
During my graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), I led the construction of a portable planetarium for outreach events at various local schools and libraries in and around Baltimore city.
We made the planetarium from cardboards and plywoods, closely following a DIY guide from AAS WorldWide Telescope. This nine-feet-diamater planetarium can be easily put together and taken apart for storage and transport. A panoramic half dome mirror is used to project videos from a projector onto the planetarium dome. We were able to construct the entire planetarium (excluding laptop and projector) with a budget of few hundred US dollars. My colleagues from JHU Physics & Astronomy Outreach made custom shows for the planetarium using the open-source WorldWide Telescope software. See the JHU Outreach Facebook Page for latest events and if your school/organization is interested in organizing a planetarium show in Baltimore.
Podcasts & Video Demonstrations
To make my research work more accessible and encourage aspiring scientists in the community, I frequently participate in podcasts and make video demonstrations of my works. Keeping in mind the language barrier to scientific research for many interested audience in Nepal (my home country), my podcasts are partially in Nepali language.
In this episode of ink & insights, I talk about various hot topics in astronomy: what is our universe made of? when did it begin? are we alone?
In this podcast with Science ka Kura, I talk about my journey from Nepal to NASA, importance of fundamental research, and prospects of large-scale astronomy research in Nepal.
In this video, I summarize my paper that describes how we designed and tested one of the detector arrays for CLASS before deploying it to the telescope site in the Atacama Desert, Chile.
This short promotional video was made for the International Workshop on Low Temperature Detectors and shows the journey of CLASS detectors from their assembly to surveying the sky.
Public Talks
I have given a number of public lectures about general cosmology and my telescopes in various academic and non-academic settings. If you are interested in hosting an event with me, you can contact me here.
