Hi, my name is Thankful!

I'm a NASA Hubble Fellowship Program Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. My research deals with millisecond pulsars (MSPs), a type of rapidly rotating neutron star.

As a full member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), I'm part of a large team whose goal is the detection of low-frequency gravitational waves from supermassive black hole binary inspirals. I'm currently chair of the NANOGrav Pulsar Timing Working Group.

You can download my CV here, and my PhD dissertation here. For publications, check out my ORCID profile.

Selected Recent Work

An extremely massive MSP (Cromartie et al. 2020, Nature Astronomy)

Detailing the measurement of J0740+6620's mass. This MSP is the most massive known to date, helping us constrain the neutron star equation of state. arXiv PDF here.

J0740+6620 update (Fonseca, Cromartie, et al. 2021, ApJ)

Added data leads to a higher-precision measurement of J0740+6620. arXiv PDF here. Also see the NICER papers (Riley et al. 2021, Miller et al. 2021) that use these results.

NANOGrav 12.5-year GW search (Arzoumanian et al. 2021, ApJ)

The NANOGrav 12.5-year data set is analyzed to uncover a common red noise process in our MSPs, indicating that we may eventually detect a stochastic GW background. arXiv PDF here.

About Me

Born and raised in Chapel Hill, NC, I earned my B.S. with Highest Honors in Physics in 2014 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I then attended the University of Virginia, where I finished my Astronomy PhD in May 2020. I fell in love with Astronomy during an REU at the Arecibo Observatory. (See more examples of my scientific and science-related writing over at Astrobites.) I'm passionate about making Astronomy more equitable for minoritized groups. Recently, I've been involved with the NHFP Anti-Racism initiative.

I love gardening, video games, hiking, music festivals, and other stuff, too. I'm a passionate vegan, Vim defender, and mother to an Aussie Shepherd mutt named Ezreal. I like pulsars so much that I have a tattoo on my wrist of the first one I discovered.