People

Biography

Koushik Chatterjee completed his undergraduate degree in India and finished his Ph.D. at the University of Amsterdam in 2020. His work focuses on black hole accretion and jet propagation and he performs large-scale numerical simulations as well as algorithm and code development. His research interests lie in investigating the complex physics of astrophysical jets and disks to interpret the observed multiwavelength electromagnetic emission from black hole systems. To generate the simulations and synthetic observations, he works with the state-of-the-art GPU-accelerated GRMHD code H-AMR and the GR ray-tracing code BHOSS.

Biography

Jamee Elder completed her Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in the philosophy of physics and astrophysics. Before Notre Dame, she completed an MPhil in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a BSc and BA(Hons) at the University of Canterbury. She was formerly a Heinrich Hertz Fellow with the Lichtenberg Group for History and Philosophy of Physics at the University of Bonn. Her current research concerns the methodology and epistemology of large astrophysical experiments, especially those—including LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA and the EHT—that involve “observing” black holes. Much of her work concerns how models and simulations are embedded in experimental methods and what epistemic implications this has for making inferences about astrophysical target systems.

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Alfredo is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His research lies at the crossroads between quantum theory and classical gravity. In particular, he is adapting novel techniques from the S-Matrix program to the study of classical solutions in general relativity such as those describing spinning black holes, a correspondence that also sheds light on the puzzle of higher-spin particles. He is currently interested in observational signatures of these classical processes, which may be measured via gravitational waves such as the ones to be detected by LIGO/LISA, but also through electromagnetic radiation. Furthermore, he is studying the asymptotic structure of spacetime and its connection to the infrared problem of quantum theory, as well as novel geometrical structures underlying scattering amplitudes in a variety of theories.

Biography

Prashant has a Ph.D. in physics from TIFR Mumbai. He is interested in experimental tests of gravity and of the equivalence principle involving compact objects, with a recent focus on facilitating such tests using black hole imaging measurements. Older interests include gravitomagnetism and its appearance in pulsar-black hole systems, the mode stability of exotic compact objects, gravitational collapse and the cosmic censorship conjecture, and solution-generating techniques like the Newman-Janis trick.  

Biography

Martin Lesourd completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy at (Trinity) Cambridge University and (Linacre) Oxford University.  He is a mathematician whose research lies in two disciplines: general relativity and geometric analysis. Broadly speaking, his aim is to better understand a space – this could be a spacetime (which contains a black hole for instance) or a Riemannian Manifold – by studying Partial Differential Equations that can be associated with that space. With regards to general relativity, he studies both the Einstein equations and the Constraint equations, and most recently has been trying to describe the formation of black holes from a purely mathematical standpoint.

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Jue Liu comes from China, and he got a Ph.D. degree at Sun Yat-sen University in 2018. His research interests include geometric analysis and mathematical general relativity. He had deep studies in the weak cosmic censorship conjecture, one of the fundamental problems in the dynamics of black holes, and proved that the spherical naked singularities constructed by Christodoulou are unstable even under gravitational perturbations. Recently he is trying to find some physical quantity such as quasilocal mass which is useful to describe the dynamics of spacetime in particular situations. One such example is the Penrose inequality, which can indirectly verify the weak cosmic censorship conjecture from the view of spacelike hypersurfaces embedded in spacetime.

Biography

Lena has a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Caltech and a Ph.D. in particle physics from Moscow State University. She is broadly interested in black hole astrophysics, with a particular focus on Milky Way’s Galactic Center black hole Sagittarius A*, its accretion, variability, and what the complex environment within a few parsecs around the black hole can tell us about its present-day near horizon behavior. Her work combines observations, numerical simulations, and pen-and-paper theory.

Biography

Fabio Pacucci is a BHI Fellow at Harvard University and a Clay Fellow at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He received his Ph.D. in 2016 at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, the school of Enrico Fermi. Before coming to the Center for Astrophysics, he was a postdoc at Yale University. Fabio’s research focuses on “all things black holes,” from local ones to the farthest ever discovered, from the small to the super-massive ones. A large part of his research deals with the formation, cosmological evolution, and observational signatures of the first population of black holes formed at redshift higher than 6.

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Angelo Ricarte is a Filipino-American astrophysicist interested in the connection between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies–from the event horizon to cosmological scales. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of California at Berkeley in 2013 and his Ph.D. at Yale University in 2019. Angelo is part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration and models the polarized radiative transport behind images of EHT targets M87* and Sgr A*. On cosmological scales, Angelo studies the black hole-galaxy connection using cosmological simulations and semi-analytic/empirical models. His larger-scale interests include black hole seeding, gravitational waves, cosmic backgrounds, and wandering supermassive black holes.

Biography

Freek Roelofs obtained his Ph.D. degree at Radboud University in the Netherlands in 2020. His general research interests include simulation and analysis of Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) data and future VLBI array concepts. He has worked on developing a synthetic data generation pipeline for the EHT, and on developing a Space VLBI mission concept aimed at obtaining ultra-high resolution images of black hole shadows. He also works on EHT time domain and model fitting analysis, and on simulated observations for the next-generation EHT.

Biography

Atul has a DPhil in Mathematics from the University of Oxford. He is interested in the mathematical physics of black holes, quantum gravity, and scattering amplitudes, with a special focus on Penrose’s twistor theory. On even weeks, his work combines string theory with twistor theory to build holographic dualities in asymptotically flat space-times. On odd weeks, he dreams of solving the googly problem and finding a theory of everything governing our world.

Biography

Kung-Yi has a Ph.D. in physics from Caltech. Before entering Caltech, he obtained his BSc in physics from National Taiwan University. Before joining BHI, he was a postdoc at CCA and Columbia University. Kung-Yi is interested in the physics nature of active galactic nuclei (AGN) feedback and how it affects the galaxy properties and black hole accretion. His other interests include understanding how fluid microphysics and cosmological processes interplay with AGN feedback and together affect the interstellar medium and circumgalactic medium. Kung-Yi has also been exploring how an AGN feedback model should physically scale when implemented in simulations of different scales.

Biography

Paul Tiede obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of Waterloo and Perimeter Institute in 2021. He is interested in the intersection of accretion modeling and Bayesian inference. As a member of the Event Horizon Telescope, he has developed modeling and simulation techniques for modeling time-variable emission or “flares” that could enable high-precision measurements of gravity. Additionally, he is a core developer of numerous software packages for the EHT, including Themis, a Bayesian parameter estimation code that has been extensively used by the EHT collaboration.

Biography

Evita Verheijden obtained her Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Amsterdam with a dissertation titled “To the horizon and beyond: unitary evolution and non-universal dynamics of horizons in holography”. Her research focuses on aspects of quantum gravity related to the dynamics and microscopic structure of horizons: those of black holes, and the ones encountered in cosmological spacetimes. She is interested in quantum-informational aspects of black holes, such as the black hole information problem and complexity. She also works on understanding the near-horizon geometry of near-extremal black holes using lower-dimensional holography. In her free time, she plays the piano, often goes to the cinema, and likes to go (ice) swimming.