I am honored and humbled to have been nominated to attend the Hong Kong Laureate Forum by a close mentor of mine, Dr. Duncan Lorimer. As an undergraduate, I was introduced to Fast Radio Burst (FRB) research through a summer program under his guidance, and I continue to work in the field as a graduate student at McGill University. At McGill, I am a member of the CHIME/FRB collaboration, which operates the world’s leading survey for FRB detection, and am supervised by Dr. Vicky Kaspi, a 2021 Shaw Laureate, and Dr. Jason Hessels. My research specifically focuses on studying the FRB population by applying statistical methods to probe the underlying universal nature of these enigmatic events. Given the attention and prestige that the Hong Kong Laureate Forum and the Lee Shau Kee Foundation have brought to FRB research, along with the opportunity to interact with leading scientists worldwide across many disciplines, I am eager to attend this year’s forum in November. I look forward to engaging with experts across many fields, exchanging ideas, and sharing my own experiences in FRB studies.

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) remain one of the most intriguing mysteries in modern astrophysics, with their origins and emission mechanisms still poorly understood. The CHIME/FRB collaboration has detected thousands of these bright millisecond-duration radio bursts, yet the survey’s sensitivity varies across different regions of FRB parameter space, making some bursts easier to detect while others are more challenging. Understanding these selection effects is crucial to accurately interpreting the observed FRB population and inferring their true universal occurrence rates. In this research, we conduct a detailed study of CHIME/FRB’s selection function using a large-scale software pipeline that simulates and injects synthetic FRBs with known properties into CHIME/FRB’s live data stream. By analyzing detection and non-detection outcomes of a large sample of synthetic bursts injected across the wide FRB parameter space, we construct a statistical model to derive selection-corrected distributions for the CHIME/FRB second catalog, as well as estimate the occurrence rates of challenging-to-detect FRBs such as highly scattered or high-width bursts. These results provide crucial insights into the intrinsic FRB population in the local universe, improving our understanding of their physical origins and aiding efforts to uncover the mechanisms driving these enigmatic cosmic transients.