The Drift Scan survey was the predecessor to the GBNCC survey and is similar in many ways. However, as the name implies it allowed the sky to simply drift through the beam of the telescope at several different declinations instead of using pointed integrations (it also used an older back-end and had half the bandwidth of the GBNCC survey, and so was slightly less sensitive). The Drift Scan survey has discovered 35 new pulsars, including seven MSPs. These include some really cool MSPs like PSRs J0348+0432, a new and unique relativistic binary, and J1023+0038, the "missing link" MSP.
The Drift Scan survey took advantage of an otherwise undesirable situation when the GBT was shut down for several months while the azimuth track was repaired and upgraded. Each day the elevation of the telescope was adjusted so that we could observe different declinations as the sky drifted through the stationary telescope beam. In this manner we were able to cover 10,300 square degrees, amassing 134 TB of data. Data from a region covering 2800 square degrees was set aside for analysis by high school students as part of the Pulsar Search Collaboratory, and they have discovered five pulsars (including one MSP), bringing the total number of new pulsars in the Drift Scan survey region to 40. New pulsars are still being found in re-analysis of the data.
I led the follow-up timing effort of the early discoveries along with Jason Boyles. UPDATE: The first two Drift Scan papers detailing these new discoveries are in press and available on arXiv. We are still following up PSR J0348+0432 using Arecibo. You can read more about this fantastic pulsar in the discovery paper, and a follow-up paper by John Antoniadis has been submitted to Science.
My thesis research focused primarily on searches for and timing of globular cluster MSPs. I searched over two dozen globular clusters, many for the first time and all more sensitively than ever before. I discovered seven MSPs in three clusters and placed some useful limits on the number of MSPs in other clusters (Lynch & Ransom 2011; Lynch, Ransom, Freire & Stairs, 2011). I also timed nine previously-known pulsars in three clusters (Lynch, Freire, Ransom, & Jacoby 2012). These included a relativistic binary MSP, for which we made the most precise measurement ever of the mass of an MSP (and the first measurement of Shapiro delay in a globular cluster pulsar). We also confirmed the non-recycled nature of a long-period globular cluster pulsar by definitively measuring its spin-down.
Speaking of non-recycled pulsars (NRPs) in globular clusters, they are something of a mystery. They are relatively young stars (less than 100 million years) but are found in clusters of only old stars (greater than billions of years). We usually assume that pulsars form in core collapse supernovae but since there haven't been any in globular clusters that could have formed these NRPs on the right timescale, they must have formed through some other mechanism. The idea that I favor is electron capture supernovae, which can occur when a massive O-Ne-Mg white dwarf crosses a critical mass threshold. Jason Boyles and I explored what the observed population of NRPs in globular clusters and limits set by sensitive searches of globular clusters, implied for the rate of electron capture supernovae. I focused on the fate of NRPs that escape from their progenitor globular clusters and enter the field of the Galaxy (Lynch, Lorimer, Ransom, & Boyles 2012). We found that realistic rates of electron capture supernovae could only be reproduced if they impart very small natal kicks (< 10 km/s) to the NRPs, but in this case the population of escaped NRPs should be pretty small and probably couldn't be distinguished with any existing large-area surveys. However, these pulsars should have a distinct spatial distribution so if enough of them do exist, a survey using the future Square Kilometer Array might be able to identify them as a separate population. That's something worth keeping in mind.