Anjana Kaushik Talluri

PhD Astrophysics

Professional Bio

Anjana Kaushik Talluri is an Astrophysics graduate student at the University of Minnesota. She is working in Dr. Lucy Fortson’s group studying both Blazars— active galactic nuclei (AGN) whose relativistic jets are along the line of sight of the observer— and radio-loud AGN with mis-aligned jets to our line-of-sight to investigate their properties as gamma-ray emitters compared to the more prevalent blazars. The gamma rays emitted from radio galaxy jets are a probe of the physics of the jet. Specifically, she is analyzing VERITAS observatory data of 3C 120 to investigate the idea that anomalously bright X-rays detected in the Chandra observatory could have a counterpart in TeV gamma rays. She is also working on implementing Boosted Decision Trees to boost sensitivity to weak AGN sources, since many radio galaxies are likely to be weak gamma-ray emitters, and on training a machine learning algorithm to identify gamma ray-initiated events from the cosmic-ray background events.

Personal Bio

I am a second year Astrophysics graduate student at the University of Minnesota. I grew up in India and moved to the US during my high school. I pursued B.S. Physics and B.S. Astronomy at UT Austin. Outside of academics, I practice Bharatanatyam, an Indian classical dance, and enjoy photography and travel. I am passionate about promoting women in science and hope to contribute to making astrophysics welcoming to all.