WVURAIL

West Virginia University  ·  Lane Department of CSEE

Instruments that
listen to the distant universe.

RAIL designs and builds the telescopes, analog front ends, and digital systems that survey the radio sky — chasing cosmology, fast radio bursts, and pulsars.

Explore our work Meet the lab

Morgantown, WV / CHIME / CHORD / HIRAX / DSPIRA

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What we do

Mapping the sky at radio wavelengths takes instruments with exceptional sensitivity — and the willingness to build them from scratch.

Recognition Researchers in our group are part of the CHIME Fast Radio Burst team, awarded the 2022 Lancelot M. Berkeley – New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy.

Our primary goal is to make groundbreaking discoveries in cosmology, fast radio bursts, and pulsars. Getting there means designing and constructing large analog and digital systems that are both extremely sensitive and adaptable enough to chase new opportunities as they appear.

Telescopes dedicated to surveying wide swaths of the sky demand novel designs and massive computing systems. We're building and commissioning them now, across North America and southern Africa.

Much of that work is open. Our firmware, control software, and analysis pipelines live on GitHub alongside the collaborations we build them with.

What we make
Analog & digitalFront ends, FPGA correlators, pipelines
Science drivers
21 cm & FRBsDark energy, transients, pulsars
Outrigger stations
ThreeGreen Bank · Hat Creek · KKO
Home
AERB 304WVU Evansdale Campus, Morgantown

Where we work

From Green Bank to the Karoo

Our instruments live where the sky is quiet. Some we build and run; others we contribute to as part of larger collaborations.

United States

West Virginia

United States

California

  • HCO CHIME/FRB outrigger station at Hat Creek Radio Observatory, California

Canada

British Columbia

  • CHIME Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, at DRAO near Penticton
  • CHORD Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector
  • KKO CHIME/FRB outrigger station in British Columbia

South Africa

The Karoo

  • HIRAX Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment — 1024 dishes, in development
More about the sites

Publications

What the instruments found

Members of the lab are authors on 69 publications from their time at WVU, across CHIME, CHIME/FRB, HIRAX, and the outrigger stations — including the pair of companion papers that made the cover of Nature in February 2019.

All 69 publications

Science education

Teachers built radio telescopes too

DSPIRA — Digital Signal Processing in Radio Astronomy — was an NSF Research Experiences for Teachers site run by the lab with the WVU Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology and the Green Bank Observatory. Over three summers, high school teachers built working horn radio telescopes, learned the same open-source signal-processing tools the lab uses on real instruments, and wrote classroom lessons around them.

Two DSPIRA teachers operating a small horn radio telescope in a field at dusk

  1. Build the telescope

    Each teacher assembled a horn antenna and a low-noise amplifier from sheet metal and off-the-shelf parts, then tested it in the RF lab at WVU.

  2. Learn the tools

    GNU Radio, Python and software-defined radio — the same open-source stack the lab uses to commission real instruments, not a teaching substitute.

  3. Observe

    Six weeks ended at Green Bank, mapping neutral hydrogen in the Milky Way with the horn they had built, alongside the observatory's own telescopes.

44 lessons, free to use About DSPIRA

Cohorts 2019 2018 2017

People

Who's in the lab

A multidisciplinary group in the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, working across engineering and astronomy.

Principal Investigator

Kevin M. Bandura, Ph.D.

Kevin M. Bandura, Ph.D.

  • Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
  • Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy

Dr. Bandura builds the systems behind wide-field radio telescopes — the analog front ends, FPGA correlators, and timing chains that let an instrument like CHIME survey the whole overhead sky at once. The science driving that work is 21 cm intensity mapping, which traces neutral hydrogen to measure how the universe's expansion has accelerated, and the outrigger stations that localize fast radio bursts precisely enough to identify the galaxies they came from.

kevin.bandura@mail.wvu.edu Faculty Webpage

Researchers 2

Dylan J. Gormley

Dylan J. Gormley

  • Ph.D. Candidate

Research focus on radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation.

This could be you

We take on undergraduate and graduate researchers every year. Write to Prof. Kevin Bandura to talk about joining.

kevin.bandura@mail.wvu.edu

Alumni 7

Kalyani B. Bhopi Ph.D. Dissertation · 2026 A Digital Calibration Source for 21 cm Cosmology Telescopes
John W. Metzger M.S. Thesis · 2026 Enhancing CHIME Data Integrity: Utilizing an Ancillary Antenna to Detect and Mask Radio Frequency Interference
Kholoud S. T. A. Khairy M.S. Thesis · 2025 Green Bank CHIME/FRB Outriggers Commissioning and Analog System Development
Joseph W. Kania Ph.D. Dissertation · 2023 Applications of Digital Filters in Radio Astronomy
Pranav R. Sanghavi Ph.D. Dissertation · 2022 Pathfinding Fast Radio Bursts Localizations using Very Long Baseline Interferometry
Xiaoqian He M.S. Thesis · 2018 Spatial Fourier Transform for Blind Detection of Radio Observations of Rotating Radio Transients
Akshaya Rane Ph.D. Dissertation · 2017 A Study of the Fast Radio Burst Population

Join the lab

Students build real
instruments here.

If you're a graduate or undergraduate student who wants hands-on work with radio telescopes — analog front ends, FPGA signal processing, or the software that turns raw voltages into science — we'd like to hear from you.

Email the lab See our code
  • Lab Advanced Engineering Research Building, Room 304
    WVU Evansdale Campus, Morgantown, WV
  • Department Lane Department of Computer Science
    and Electrical Engineering