People

Riccardo received his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Germany) in 2021 and, after a NHFP Einstein Fellowship at MIT, he joined the BHI as a Fellow. Riccardo’s research focuses on studying transient and persistent accretion events onto black holes of different masses. Most of his current efforts are dedicated to the discovery and study of a new population of X-ray flaring galaxies, the so-called quasi-periodic eruptions.

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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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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.

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Matthew Heydeman completed his Ph.D. at Caltech in 2019 before beginning a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University in the Princeton Gravity Initiative. He is now a fellow at the BHI and the Harvard University physics department. Matthew works broadly at the interface of black holes in string theory and the AdS/CFT correspondence. To study quantum aspects of black holes from this point of view, he uses techniques from supersymmetry, quantum field /many body theory, dualities, and (quantum) general relativity. While at the BHI, he studies how the gravitational path integral gives a microscopic counting of black holes and how spacetime itself may emerge from a more conventional quantum theory.

Siddharth received a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh in 2025 and a PhD in Physics from the University of Southern California in 2018. He works in the philosophy of physics, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of language. In particular, he has written on conceptual issues surrounding quantum black holes, the foundations of quantum mechanics and their connections to causal modeling, and how modeling practices in physics can inform questions in the philosophy of language. His PhD in physics focused on quantum computing.

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Daniel Palumbo received a S.B. in Physics from MIT in 2018 and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Harvard in 2023. His work focuses on extracting novel physical insights from very-long-baseline interferometry data, with a recent focus on the photon ring, the observational signature of light orbiting a black hole. Daniel also studies the magnetization and dynamics of black hole accretion flows, and their relationship to black hole spin and energy extraction. Among several leadership positions across the EHT, ngEHT, and BHEX consortia, Daniel also coordinates the local VLBI-related summer internship programs; interested students from Harvard and from external institutions should always feel welcome to reach out.

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Sasha got his Ph.D. in 2022 at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow. He studies central regions of jets in active galaxies using multimessenger astronomy, trying to understand what they consist of and how they become highly relativistic. Focusing on the highest-resolution radio interferometric observations, he supplements them with optical, X-ray, and neutrino detections. Every band and particle brings its own unique information on processes taking place in those jets, on their content and features.

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Cora Prather received their Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2022. After a Metropolis Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Cora joined the BHI as a Fellow. Their 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.

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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.

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.