Vishnu Balakrishnan

Vishnu Balakrishnan is a postdoctoral researcher in Liam Connor’s group, working in time-domain radio astronomy with a focus on pulsars, fast radio bursts (FRBs), and large-scale survey software. He joined the group in September 2025.

He received his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany, where he developed advanced pulsar search techniques, including template-bank searches for ultra-relativistic binary systems across the full Keplerian parameter space and semi-supervised machine-learning approaches to pulsar candidate classification.

He was a core contributor to the ERC Starting Grant–funded COMPACT project, where he designed and implemented a distributed pulsar search engine for processing petabyte-scale MeerKAT baseband data, leading to the discovery of multiple pulsars in globular clusters. The software and techniques he has developed have contributed to the discovery of over 100 pulsars across several major surveys. He was also a member of the TRAPUM (TRAnsients and PUlsars with MeerKAT) collaboration, where he led the successful re-detection of the relativistic binary pulsar M30B, a system that had remained undetected for nearly two decades after its initial discovery.

He is currently developing FRB detection algorithms and real-time software for the Coherent All-Sky Monitor (CASM) and is involved in the DSA-110 and DSA-2000 projects.