Max Trevor
Current affiliation: University of Maryland
Biographical note:
Max was an undergraduate working on his first research project in X-ray astronomy when LIGO announced the first measurement of gravitational waves. Knowing that the age of multi-messenger astronomy was dawning, Max was determined to make his way into the new field of gravitational wave astronomy. A decade later, Max is finishing his PhD at the University of Maryland. A LIGO member since 2020, Max has worked as part of the PyCBC team and led the low-latency PyCBC Live search for gravitational waves in O4. Max has also worked extensively on detector characterization, developing techniques to mitigate the impact of nonstationary detector noise on the PyCBC search. Outside of academics, Max loves playing board games and spending time in nature.
Rahul Dhurkunde
Current affiliation: University of Portsmouth
Professional webpage: https://rahuldhurkunde.com/
Biographical note:
Rahul Dhurkunde is a gravitational-wave astronomer currently working as a Research Fellow at the University of Portsmouth and a member of the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA Collaboration. His research career began during Master’s thesis at IUCAA as part of the BS–MS program at IISER Pune. He subsequently completed a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, graduating summa cum laude, and continued there briefly as a postdoctoral researcher. His current research focuses on leading the offline search efforts within the PyCBC team and developing novel search strategies for the current and future gravitational-wave observatories.
Colm Talbot
Current affiliation: Princeton University
Professional webpage: https://aiscience.uchicago.edu/colm-talbot/
Biographical note:
Colm Talbot works on applications of computational Bayesian inference in gravitational-wave astronomy. Collisions of black holes and neutron stars in the distant universe emit more energy in their final moments than all of the stars in the Universe. This energy is carried away as gravitational radiation, stretching and squeezing spacetime as they travel. After the first observation by advanced LIGO in 2015, these waves are now routinely observed. Talbot is interested in developing statistical methods, computational techniques, and theoretical models that enable us to use these observations to learn about the astrophysics of massive stars and the nature of relativity. In the coming years, the field of gravitational-wave astronomy will enter a data-rich era allowing for high-precision tests of astrophysics and fundamental physics. However, leveraging this larger dataset will require novel analysis techniques where AI methods show great promise. Additionally, Talbot is committed to developing open-source software tools for astrophysics.
Marek Jan Szczepańczyk
Current affiliation: University of Warsaw
Professional webpage: https://www.fuw.edu.pl/~mszczepanczyk/
Biographical note:
Marek is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw, Poland, and a recipient of a "Polish Returns" award. He received his PhD in 2018 from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and did his postdoc at the University of Florida. His 12-year expertise lies in LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational-wave burst searches for core-collapse supernovae, generic sources, and compact binaries. He is interested in learning new Physics through detecting gravitational waves from unexpected or challenging astrophysical sources.
Tanmaya Mishra
Current affiliation: University of Portsmouth
Professional webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/tanmayamishra
Biographical note:
Tanmaya is a Research Fellow at the University of Portsmouth, working on searches for binary black hole mergers using gravitational-wave data and on enhancing the PyCBC search pipeline with machine learning techniques. He recently completed his PhD at the University of Florida, where he specialized in gravitational-wave data analysis with the Coherent WaveBurst search algorithm under the supervision of Prof. Sergey Klimenko. His research interests include compact binary searches, machine learning applications in astrophysics, and intermediate-mass black holes in the pair-instability supernova mass gap.
Chia-Hsuan Hsiung
Current affiliation: Tamkang University
Biographical note:
Chia-Hsuan Hsiung received his Master’s degree in Physics from Tamkang University, Taiwan, in 2022. He works on stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds and advanced data analysis within the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA collaboration, contributing to analyses using the official PyGWB pipeline. His research interests focus on developing statistical and computational methods to extract weak astrophysical and cosmological signals from noisy data.
Johann Fernandes
Current affiliation: IIT Bombay
Biographical note:
Johann is pursuing his Ph. D. in Gravitational Wave Astrophysics at the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Powai, Mumbai. His intrests lie in the studies of the eccentricities of binary black hole inspirals and applications of AI techniques to improving detection significance of GW transient searches. He currently has taken over the mantle of leading the PyCBC live search from Max and is hard at work to get everything ready for the upcoming observing run. While he is not obsessing over PyCBC code he enjoys a spot of reading fiction and playing video games.
