Chengcheng received her Ph.D. in Astronomy from Columbia University in 2025. Her research focuses on multimessager signatures of compact binary supermassive black holes, their observation in time-domain surveys such as LSST and the Nancy Roman Telescope, and their detectability as low-frequency gravitational waves in LISA/PTAs. Additionally, she is recently interested in the physics of stellar-mass black holes and their interactions with stars in the galactic center.

RSVP

Speakers

Alex Lupsasca, Vanderbilt University

Alice Bucknell, Artist; SCI-Arc

Andrea Puhm, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Chris Smeenk, Western University

Chung-Pei Ma, UC Berkeley

Daniel Jafferis, Harvard University

Dennis Lehmkuhl, Universität Bonn

Hannah Marcus, Harvard University

Hsin-Yu Chen, University of Texas at Austin

Juan Maldacena, IAS

Matias Zaldarriaga, IAS

Matthew Dodelson, Harvard University

Nick Huggett, University of Illinois at Chicago

Raffaella Margutti, UC Berkeley

Rashid Sunyaev, Max Planck Gesellschaft

Robert Myers, Perimeter Institute

Roberto Emparan, Institut de Ciències del Cosmos, Universitat de Barcelona

Sasha Philippov, University of Maryland

Sylvia Biscoveanu, CIERA, Northwestern University

Biography

Hannah Rana is a Schmidt Science Fellow at Harvard University and Research Associate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Black Hole Initiative. She is the incoming first ever BHEX Postdoctoral Fellow. As a member of the Event Horizon Telescope and the BHEX space mission, her work focuses on black hole detection, where she works at the intersection and instrumentation for ground and space VLBI. Hannah uses GRMHD simulations to study features of the black hole photon ring to be revolved by the BHEX mission. She completed her PhD at the University of Oxford in astrophysics instrumentation, and has previously held appointments at Caltech, NASA, ESA, CERN and as a founding member of Neutron Star Systems, an electric propulsion space startup. Hanna has worked on 5 space-based astronomy missions to date.