Contact Information
Title
Professor
Education
Ph.D. Physics – Caltech, 1998
B.S. Physics – Sonoma State University, 1993
Previous Experience
After postdocs at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I was a professor at Penn State and Texas Tech before coming to UMBC.
Professional Interests
The detection of gravitational waves made history and opened a new window onto the universe. Now we need to widen that window and use it to look for signs of ever more extreme matter and gravity.
These days my interests center on three detectors, the existing LIGO and the planned LISA and Cosmic Explorer. I am mostly interested in detecting novel sources of gravitational waves beyond the binary mergers that we are finding today, as well as refining our ways of constraining source properties with binary mergers. Continuous gravitational waves should be emitted by neutron stars (LIGO, Cosmic Explorer) or galaxy mergers (LISA) and lots of astronomical events (magnetar flares, pulsar glitches, fast radio bursts) should trigger short bursts of gravitational waves from neutron stars.
Selected Publications
- “Search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in the first part of the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing run,” A. G. Abac et al. (LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration)
- “Characterizing Gravitational Wave Detector Networks: From A# to Cosmic Explorer,” I. Gupta et al., Class. Quantum Grav. 41, 245001 (2024)
- “Improved Upper Limits on Gravitational-wave Emission from NS 1987A in SNR 1987A,” B. J. Owen et al., Astrophys. J. Lett. 962, L23 (2024)