We are thrilled to announce that an exceptional cohort of faculty and students have joined us this Fall! We have 3 new faculty members and 5 new graduate students this semester and an additional faculty member slated to join us in Fall ’23. Below are some of the details:

Faculty:

Collin Capano has joined UMassD from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Hannover). His research is focused on analyzing gravitational waves from black holes and neutron stars. Through these observations he hopes to answer fundamental questions about the universe, such as: What happens near a black hole? What does matter do under extremely high pressures?

Sarah Caudill has joined UMassD from Nikhef in the Netherlands. Sarah is a member of LIGO and leads one of the pipelines for search algorithms for gravitational waves in LIGO and Virgo data coming from the coalescence of compact binary objects.

Michael Puerrer has joined URI from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Potsdam). His current work is focussing on deep learning based surrogate models of gravitational waves emitted from coalescing black hole binaries. These predictive models are the crucial tools to locate and extract evidence and information about the evolution and merger of compact binaries from GW signals buried in noisy LIGO data.

Vijay Varma will be joining UMassD from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Potsdam) in Fall ’23. His research is focused on numerical relativity and gravitational wave modeling using data-driven methods. In general, he is interested in relativistic astrophysics, particularly involving compact objects such as black holes and neutron stars. 

Students:

Som Dev has joined UMassD from IISER Kolkata.

Aubrey Laity has joined URI from Millersville University of Pennsylvania.

Matt Maini has joined the MS program at URI after completing a BS degree there.

Adhrit Ravichandran has joined UMassD from IIT Roorkee.

Parth Sastry has joined UMassD from IIT Bombay.