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Biography

Ben Prather received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2022. After a Metropolis Fellowship at Los Alamos National Labaratory, Ben
joined the BHI as a Fellow. His research focuses on state of the art global simulations of black hole accretion systems, with an emphasis on understanding the
communication between large and small scales in low-luminosity AGN, including Event Horizon Telescope sources.

I am a graduate student in the physics department currently working with Michael Johnson. I am a theorist with an interest in developing analytic techniques for use in the EHT and, more broadly, General Relativity. I am currently working on new approximation methods to help extract information from the observational visibility of a photon ring.

Simon completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 2025 before joining the BHI and the Harvard University physics department as a postdoctoral research fellow. Simon works broadly on aspects of the AdS/CFT correspondence. His research draws on methods from Penrose’s twistor theory, integrable theories, and topological strings, among other areas, to gain a better understanding of holographic dualities in asymptotically flat spacetimes. He is particularly interested in the role of black holes in this context.

Daine Danielson’s research interests include quantum gravity, quantum field theory in curved spacetime, quantum information theory, and black holes. His recent work has focused on gravitationally mediated entanglement and decoherence, infrared symmetries and memory effects in quantum field theory and gravity, and theoretical aspects of laboratory probes of quantum gravity. This line of inquiry has recently given rise to the discovery that a black hole, and the cosmological horizon, exerts a universal rate of decoherence on all quantum superpositions in its vicinity. Outside his interests in black holes, Daine is actively engaged with issues related to nuclear nonproliferation, including through his work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Daine is a Hertz Fellow, and earned his PhD and MS in Physics at the University of Chicago under the mentorship of Bob Wald. He also holds a BS in Computational Physics with a minor in Mathematics from the University of California, Davis.

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Biography

Romain Ruzziconi completed his PhD at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in 2020 and began his first postdoc at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). In 2023, he joined the University of Oxford as a Titchmarsh Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute and Walker Early Career Fellow at Balliol College. He is now a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow affiliated with the Black Hole Initiative and the Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature in the Department of Physics at Harvard University.

Romain works broadly at the interface of holography, quantum gravity, scattering amplitudes, and twistor theory. Recently, he has focused on formulating holography for spacetimes with a vanishing cosmological constant, which serve as models for real-world phenomena such as gravitational waves and black holes. He is particularly interested in connecting this framework with AdS/CFT, exploring the rich celestial symmetry structures that arise in this context, and their interpretation in terms of Carrollian physics.

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May 21 & 22, 2025

Gutman Conference Center

6 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA

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