Into the Wild

Caradoc Animal Clinic + Procyon Wildlife

I enjoy working with animals and it's certainly developed into a strong passion and ongoing endeavour. I previously worked at Caradoc Animal Clinic for a few years as a Veterinary Assistant. Duties would include facilitating appointments, restraining animals during treatment, and general clinical work.

I was also a senior volunteer at Procyon Wildlife where we try to help animals recover and go back into the wild with full health. We treated newborn and/or ill animals ranging from squirrels to foxes. I assisted with feeding and medicating (subcutaneous and oral), general labour, monitored behavioural changes, and released wildlife back to their original habitat.

Like numerous rehabilitation centres possibly near you, Procyon Wildlife is entirely operated by volunteers and looking for people of diverse skills interested in helping. It's challenging but incredibly rewarding, and there's always a lot of excitement.

ALPHA Experiment

York University + CERN

I carried out research at York University for a summer in collaboration with the ALPHA project at CERN. The key goal of this experiment is to perform gravitational and spectroscopic tests on antihydrogen, and compare its properties with the "normal" hydrogen that appears prevalent throughout the universe. My project involved simulating antiproton beams and optimizing a detector design to ultimately help improve antihydrogen production.

Understanding Unconsciousness

Brain & Mind Institute

Past research of mine has included analyzing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals from patients in different orders of unconsciouness (e.g. vegetative state) to better understand neural activity in these individuals. This is an ambitious endeavour to improve our knowledge of brain functionality and connectivity with incredible implications for novel medical treatments. Here is an overview of the larger work being conducted at the Brain & Mind institute that I was briefly assisting.

Nuclear Fusion

MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center

I previously studied plasma turbulence in collaboration with international researchers to improve predictive capabilities of plasma behaviour in magnetic-confinement fusion devices. We used statistical techniques and analytic models to better understand enhanced confinement regimes for tokamak plasmas in the pursuit of fusion power as a new sustainable energy source for society.

Superradiance

Western University

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) have been described as the greatest enigma currently in astronomy as they are extremely energetic events (expected power output of 500 million Suns for a few milliseconds) that are suspected to be visible every 10 seconds in the sky if we could see radio waves, yet the mechanism(s) behind their occurrences remains an open question.

My honours thesis  project at Western University resulted in developing code to solve the Maxwell-Bloch equations which were being studied to elucidate how a quantum optical phenomenon known as superradiance may occur in various environments (e.g. active galactic nuclei, star-forming regions). The aim of this project was to simulate signals resulting from coherent radiation to try and explain the emergence of astrophysical events such as FRBs.

I studied coherent radiation in astrophysical environments to simulate emissions from large-scale entangled quantum mechanical systems naturally present in the universe. In this work I developed a Python script and C++ code to solve a set of nonlinear partial differential equations which model superradiance using quantum electrodynamics.

Mathews A, 2017, The Role of Superradiance in Cosmic Fast Radio Bursts, Honours thesis, Univ. Western Ontario

Houde M, Mathews A and Rajabi F 2018 Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 475 1

Houde M, Rajabi F, Gaensler B M, Mathewsa A, and Tranchant V 2019 Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 482 4