Just recycling (haha that's a pun here) this text from the research page for now.

Neutron stars (NS) are one of the potential stellar endpoints for stars greater than eight times the mass of our Sun. These stars are extremely compact and can exert immense gravitational forces on nearby objects. By pulling in material from a neighboring star, a NS can "spin up" and begin rotating very rapidly. This so-called "accretion" of material releases jets of energy (shown as the green cone in the NASA image above) from the NS that, due to the rapid rotation, can be observed from Earth as periodic signals. We call these kinds of stars pulsars, and some of these objects can be spun up to the point that we observe their "pulses" once every few milliseconds!

Part of my research is dedicated to observing and timing these so-called "millisecond pulsars" (or MSPs). I am particularly interested in observations of MSPs that exist in binary star systems with different kinds of low-mass companions. We call these systems "spiders," due to the parallels between the pulsar slowly wearing away its companion and the behavior of some species of spiders. Spider systems with very-low-mass objects (on the order of a few percent of the mass of our sun) are called "black widows", and systems with low-mass, main sequence stars (e.g., red dwarfs) are called "redbacks." We only know of a few dozen spiders, yet they play an important role in our current, and certainly future, understanding of the MSP "recycling" process (the process by which the NS gets spun up). Finding more of and studying the population of these intriguing systems can therefore help further our understanding of this complex process.