Research team

It has been my pleasure to work with many talented people over my career, and below is some information about them. Currently, I am a member of the Institute for Gravitational Research in Glasgow, and work closely with the CIERA Group of Vicky Kalogera. If you might be interested in joining as a postdoctoral fellow, please get in touch!

Current group

PhDs

Chase Kimball (Northwestern, 2018–Present)
Chase is researching how to use our gravitational wave observations to understand the population of compact binaries. He is especially interested in hierarchical mergers, where the remnant of one merging binary goes on to merge again.
Website | ORCID | GitHub | Twitter

Monica Gallegos Garcia (Northwestern, 2018–Present)
Monica is working on understanding the details of binary stellar evolution, and in particular the role of common envelope evolution in producing the binaries we observe with gravitational waves.
Website | GitHub | LinkedIn | Twitter

Kyle Akira Rocha (Northwestern, 2018–Present)
Kyle has been looking at how we can build the next generation of binary population synthesis codes (POSYDON) by using active learning to efficiently compute grids of detailed binary evolution simulations.
Website | GitHub | Publons

Camille Liotine (Northwestern, 2020–Present)
Camille is looking at modelling black hole binaries and comparing complementary observations from X-rays and gravitational waves.
Website | GitHub | LinkedIn

Christian Chapman-Bird (Glasgow, 2020–Present)
Christian is looking at data analysis with LISA and long-lived gravitational-wave signals.
Website | GitHub | LinkedIn | Instagram

Johnathon Hyland (Glasgow, 2021–Present)
Christian is looking at population inference with gravitational-wave data observations.
Website

Undergraduates

Jared Siegel (Northwestern/U. of Chicago, 20202–Present)
Jared is a summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates student. He is currently working on understanding the population properties of low-mass X-ray binaries.
NASA ADS | LinkedIn | Triple Helix

Sam Imperato (Northwestern, 2019–Present)
Sam is a long-time undergraduate in our group. He is currently working on understanding the evolution of low-mass X-ray binaries.
GitHub | LinkedIn

Past group

PhDs

Elizabeth Teng (Northwestern, 2020–2021)
Elizabeth is interested in applying data science techniques to gravitational-wave observations, and is currently looking at generating populations of binary star systems.
Website | GitHub | LinkedIn | Twitter

Eve Chase (Northwestern, 2018–2021)
Eve is working on uncovering the properties of black holes using gravitational wave data and the properties of neutron stars with electromagnetic data. She has been busy inferring the properties of LIGO–Virgo sources (she was one of the leads for GW170608), and she is exploring what we can do observations of kilonovae.
Website | ORCID | GitHub | LinkedIn | Twitter

Lindsay DeMarchi (Northwestern, 2018–2021)
Lindsay is researching how to use electromagnetic and gravitational wave observations of supernovae to understand how stars explode and compact objects form. She is now continuing her graduate research with Shane Larson looking at multimessenger observations with LISA.
Website | LinkedIn

Monica Rizzo (Northwestern, 2018–2020)
Monica has been working on how we can infer the properties of gravitational wave sources—she has contribute to both RIFT and Bilby. She is now continuing her graduate research looking at extreme mass-ratio inspirals and physics education with Shane Larson.
Website | GitHub | LinkedIn | Twitter

Michael Zevin (Northwestern, 2018–2020)
Michael is working on unveiling the lives and deaths of stars through gravitational wave and electromagnetic observations. His research has spanned a wide range of topics, from developing Gravity Spy to updating the COSMIC population synthesis code.
Website | ORCID | GitHub | LinkedIn | Twitter | AstroBites

Scott Coughlin (Northwestern/Cardiff, 2018–2019)
Scotty led the Gravity Spy project, combining community science with machine learning to classify glitches in the LIGO and Virgo detectors. He was also one of the architects of the COSMIC population synthesis code.
Website | GitHub | LinkedIn | Thesis

Postgraduate masters

Matthew Carney (Northwestern, 2018–2020)
Matt worked on how we can infer the properties of gravitational wave signals, and has been contributing to the next-generation parameter estimation code Bilby.
Website | GitHub | LinkedIn | Twitter

Undergraduates

Carlyn Savino (Northwestern, 2019–2021)
Carlyn investigated ways improve the Gravity Spy machine learning pipeline, and how the convolutional neural network behaved with different configurations.
GitHub | LinkedIn

Liam Brodie (Northwestern/Rochester Institute of Technology, Summer 2019)
Liam completed a summer project investigating current waveform models for eccentric binaries, reviewing the literature and putting together some numerical comparisons.
GitHub | LinkedIn

Andrew X Kim (Northwestern/U. of Michigan, Summer 2019, 2020)
Andrew completed a summer project testing and benchmarking Bilby. He also contributed to the tutorials accompanying the LIGO–Virgo guide to data analysis.
LinkedIn

Michael Kurkowski (Northwestern/Notre Dame, Summer 2019)
Michael completed an Illinois Space Grant Consortium summer studentship with us. He worked on included prescriptions describing pair-instability supernovae into COSMIC.
GitHub | LinkedIn

Camille Liotine (Northwestern/Princeton, 2019–2020)
Camille was a summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates student, and continued to complete her senior thesis with us. She is currently working on understanding the X-ray binary phase of binary black hole progenitors.
Website | GitHub | LinkedIn

Nikolaus Zen Prusinski (Northwestern/U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Summer 2019)
Nik was a summer Research Experiences for Undergraduates student. He worked on putting constraints on gravitational-wave memory.
Website

Kaliroë Pappas (Northwestern, Spring–Summer 2019)
Kaliroë joined are research group following completing her undergrad, and working on evolving binary systems with mass loss from outer Lagrangian points. She is now a graduate student at MIT.
GitHub | LinkedIn

Matthew Walsh (Northwestern, 2019–2020)
Matthew was a long-time undergraduate in our group. He worked on algorithms to pick where in parameter space to perform new simulations of binary stellar evolution to best constrain the end points of their evolution.
GitHub | LinkedIn

Jonathan Clarke (Birmingham, 2016–2017)
Jonny completed his Masters thesis working on modelling hypervelocity stars as probes of the Milky Way potential. with Alberto Sesana and me. He’s now doing his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.
Website

Emma Stevenson (Birmingham, 2016–2017)
Emma completed her Masters thesis working on prospects for the detection of gravitational waves from supermassive black hole binaries using pulsar timing arrays. Emma now does exciting things in space traffic.
LinkedIn

Joshua Sweeney (Birmingham, 2016–2017)
Josh completed his Masters thesis working on the effect of black hole dynamics on gravitational radiation from coalescing supermassive black hole binaries with Alberto Sesana and me.

Jessie Venables (Birmingham, 2016–2017)
Jessie completed her Masters thesis working on the effect of black hole dynamics on gravitational radiation from coalescing supermassive black hole binaries with Alberto Sesana and me.
LinkedIn

Zhilu Wang (Birmingham/U. of Science and Technology of China, Summer 2016)
Zhilu completed a summer project looking at how well we can measure the properties of intermediate-mass black holes with LIGO. He’s now doing a PhD in Computer Engineering.
Google Scholar | LinkedIn | ResearchGate