Photo of Gurman Sachdeva

welcome to my homepage :)

I'm a 1st year astronomy PhD student at UofT. Thus far, I've primarily done research in radio instrumentation, with a focus on sensitivity characterization and telescope commissioning. I've also dabbled in hydrodynamics simulations with the goal of understanding certain astrophysical transients. Read more about my projects below!

I grew up in Brampton, Ontario, where I attended Turner Fenton Secondary School. I founded its first ever Astronomy Club and have involved myself in astronomy outreach ever since. I did my undergrad at UofT, completing the Astronomy & Physics specialist program alongside a computer science minor and math minor. From my second year onwards, I was an executive of the undergraduate Astronomy Union, responsible for public outreach, student advocacy, and astronomy-related events and initiatives. I first served as its second-year representative, followed by VP of Communications, and finally VP of Operations. I am now the Union's graduate student liaison, and my outreach efforts continue through the Graduate Astronomy Students Association's AstroTours program.

I love teaching, and my career goal is to become a professor. Several years into private tutoring, I snagged my first teaching assistantship, which was for MAT135 during the 2023 fall semester. I followed this up with a couple other TAships including an introductory astrophysics course, AST320 in spring 2025. I will continue to TA throughout grad school, and I consider myself lucky for being able to look forward to this part of academia!

On the other hand, here are the courses I've completed, am currently taking, or plan to take at UofT. Students tend to worry a lot about having a perfect academic record, especially when it comes to grad school applications. While I'm proud of my academic record, I've learned that it's okay to have some stinkers in there too! Click to toggle the visibility of my grades.

Astronomy   Physics     Math        Comp Sci    Other      

CTA200

AST221

AST222

AST326

AST320

AST425

AST431

AST1440

AST2050

AST1501

AST3101

AST1410

PHY151

PHY152

PHY256

PHY250

PHY252

PHY254

PHY224

PHY350

PHY356

PHY354

PHY407

PHY408

MAT157

MAT240

MAT224

MAT237

MAT244

STA257

APM346

MAT334

CSC108

CSC148

CSC165

CSC207

CSC209

CSC236

CSC311

CSC413

EAS121

ESS205

PHL245

Note that AST3101 is essentially a placeholder for many different actual course offerings. I took High Performance Computing, taught by Hanno Rein, and Black Hole Plasma Physics, taught by Bart Ripperda. (Both courses were great!)

I highly recommend visiting the astrophotos and cool stuff sections of this website, as they contain most of the content I've uploaded here. Building this site from scratch has been a project of mine since summer 2023. I update it every month or so. If you notice any bugs or other issues, please contact me.

select projects

Contact me if you want to know more about any of these projects!

Sensitivity Characterization of the CHIME/FRB Hat Creek Outrigger

under construction

Accretion Disk Collision Simulations for Quasi-periodic Eruptions in AREPO

I'm working with Chris Matzner and Pavan Vynatheya on simulations where stars are smashed through black hole accretion disks.

CHIME-KKO VLBI Pulse Calibration with Temporally Distant Calibrators

In summer 2024, with Juan Mena-Parra and Mattias Lazda, I explored how well the location of a pulsar could be constrained using very-long-baseline interferometry with the CHIME + Outriggers telescopes using sub-optimal calibrators. Our motivation was to characterize the system's fast radio burst localization abilities under unideal circumstances.