about me
I am a gravitational-wave astrophysicist. My group creates new ways to exploit LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA measurements to answer questions about gravity, black holes and neutron stars, while paving the way for future instruments like LISA. We ask questions like:
- How heavy are black holes, how fast do they spin, and what does that say about how they formed?
- What does spacetime look like in the strong-field regime of a merger?
- Can we use gravitational waves to measure the expansion of the universe?
I head the LIGO group at Columbia University, and co-run the gravitational-waves group at the Flatiron Institute. Our work spans black-hole ringdowns and tests of general relativity, the astrophysical population of merging black holes, and machine-learning and statistical methods for gravitational-wave data analysis.
Before joining Columbia University and the Flatiron Institute, I was a Flatiron Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Astrophysics and a NASA Einstein Fellow at MIT. I obtained my PhD in Physics from Caltech in 2019, where I was part of the LIGO Laboratory, and I have been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration since 2012. For the full story, see my CV.