The UCD Relativity Group currently consists of three permanent faculty members, two Royal Society-Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) University Research Fellows, an Ad Astra Fellow, an SFI-Irish Research Council (IRC) Pathway Fellow, an adjunct professor, two postdocs and six PhD students.
Faculty
Adrian Ottewill
I have over 30 years Faculty experience at Oxford University and UCD with a long record of research supervision of PhD and postdoctoral students in classical and quantum gravity with particular emphasis on gravitational wave astronomy, quantum field theory and wave propagation in curved space-time. I am a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and Royal Astronomical Society and has been a Member of the Royal Irish Academy for over 20 years.
University website
Barry Wardell
I am an Associate Professor working in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at University College Dublin. My main research interests involve the study of Black Holes and Cosmic Strings, from both numerical and analytical perspectives. I am also interested in other aspects of General Relativity, Astrophysics, and Computational Science.
Personal website
University website
Niels Warburton
I am an Assistant Professor and Royal Society–Science Foundation Ireland University Research Fellow. My research centres around modelling gravitational wave emission from compact binary systems, with a particular emphasis on small mass-ratio systems. I model these binaries using black hole perturbation theory, a method that models the system as a perturbation to the exact black hole solutions of General Relativity. Small mass ratio binaries span from extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) with mass ratios 10^5:1 — a key source for the future space-based gravitational wave detector LISA — to intermediate mass ratio inspirals (IMRIs) with mass ratio 10:1 — a source for both space- and ground-based detectors.
I am an active member of the LISA Consortium where I co-chair the Waveform Working Group and am a coordinator for the EMRI waveform Working Package.
University website
Sarp Akcay
I am an Ad Astra Fellow with 10 years of postdoctoral experience in the UK, France, Ireland, and Germany. I was an IRC postdoc between 2014 and 2016.
I am a member of both the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration and the LISA Consortium. My research interests are mathematical and computational general relativity with specific focus on modelling compact binary inspirals and mergers that are detectable by either ground-based or space interferometers. I have done work in the fields gravitational self-force and effective-one body theory. I am part of a collaborative effort that is currently building a waveform approximant for parameter estimation with LIGO-Virgo. I have also been in the review committees for the other similar approximants.
University website
Christiana Pantelidou
I am a Royal Society – Science Foundation Ireland University Research Fellow. Currently my research focuses on understanding non-linear phenomena in gravitational physics, including but not limited to the phenomenon of gravitational turbulence and its potential astrophysical and cosmological ramifications. I am also interested in gravity in AdS and its relation to fluid dynamics through the AdS/CFT correspondence, real-time holography, quasinormal modes, black hole stability, and numerical relativity.
I am very enthusiastic about public outreach and about promoting matters of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
Chris Kavanagh
I am an SFI-IRC Pathway Fellow in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at UCD. My current research focuses on analytic approaches, such as the post-Newtonian / post-Minkowskian approximations and gravitational self-force, to modelling black-hole binaries and their gravitational radiation as sources for gravitational wave detectors. I am also interested in the interplay between methods used for gravitational wave physics and those used for scattering problems in particle physics.
Marc Casals (adjunct)
I am a Research Professor at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (CBPF) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and an Adjunct Lecturer at the School of Mathematics and Statistics at UCD. I am a researcher in General Relativity and in Quantum Field in curved spacetimes, with a particular interest in classical and quantum black holes. On the classical side, my work ranges from black hole stability properties to black hole binary inspirals and gravitational waves. On the quantum side, my work covers Hawking radiation, quantum backreaction and higher-dimensional black holes.
Personal website
Postdoctoral Researchers
Brad Cownden
I am a postdoctoral researcher working with Christiana Pantelidou on problems concerning gravitational turbulence and black hole quasinormal modes. I have worked on the question of the stability of anti-de-Sitter spacetimes within the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, utilizing both analytical and numerical methods. I have previously worked with phenomena related to the soliton resolution conjecture and moduli fixing in warped flux compactifications of type IIb string theory. I have practical experience with high performance computing on CPU clusters as well as GPU accelerated methods.
Gabriel Andres Piovano
I am an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at UCD. My research lies at the interface between black hole perturbation theory, data analysis, and gravitational self-force. In particular, I am interested in modelling Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals (or EMRIs for short), one of the most beautifully complicated sources detectable by future space-borne observatories like LISA. My current research focus on the motion and gravitational waves emission of spinning compact objects, and LISA data analysis for EMRIs.
PhD Students
Kevin Kiely
I am an Irish Research Council funded PhD student working on devising new functional methods that will allow one to generate fast and accurate models of the gravitational waves emitted by an extreme mass ratio inspiral.
Jake Williams
I am an Ad Astra PhD candidate supervised by Sarp Akçay. My research interests involve all things spinning in General Relativity. My current research deals with analysing the ability of precessing approximants to accurately model highly precessing compact binary inspirals. I am also looking at calculating the self-force correction to geodetic spin precession for equatorial orbits in Kerr spacetime. When not doing research I enjoy baking, building computers, and attending metal concerts.
Kevin Cunningham
I am a PhD student funded by the Irish Research Council. My supervisor is Dr. Niels Warburton. I am interested in modelling Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals using Black Hole Perturbation Theory and self-force techniques, as well as gravitational wave memory effects. I am a contributor to the Black Hole Perturbation Toolkit.
Chris Devitt
I am a PhD student funded by the Irish Research Council and my supervisor is Barry Wardell. I am working on applying self-force techniques to modified theories of gravity, such as scalar-tensor and vector tensor theories, with the goal of placing constraints on these theories.
Jakob Neef
I am a PhD student supervised by Chris Kavanagh. My work focuses on post-Newtonian expansions of self-force to obtain analytical solutions describing EMRI dynamics. I am funded by Science Foundation Ireland.
Giulio Taiocchi
I am a PhD student at UCD from September 2022. I did my bachelor and master in Milan, and I did my master thesis in Lisbon at the Centra Group. I mainly work with asymptotically Anti de Sitter space time, through numerical methods, and I am interested in turbulent behaviours in General Relativity and Fluid Dynamics. My supervisor is Christiana Pantelidou.
Former Members
- Cormac Breen – PhD student now lecturer at TU Dublin
- Sam Dolan – Irish Research Council postdoc now a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield, UK
- Leanne Durkan – PhD student who continued to a postdoc at University of Texas, Austin, USA.
- Anna Heffernan – PhD student and Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow. Went on to do a postdoc at the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency at ESTEC in the Netherlands, a postdoc at the University of Florida, a postdoc at the University of Guelph, Canada, and a postdoc at the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain.
- Seth Hopper – visiting postdoc now a lecturer at Earlham College, USA
- Benjamin Leather – PhD student who went on to a postdoc at the Albert Einstein Institute, Gemrnay
- Philip Lynch – PhD Student who went on to a postdoc at the Albert Einstein Institute, Germany
- Josh Mathews – PhD student who went on to a postdoc at the National University of Singapore
- Patrick Nolan – PhD student now in industry
- Conor O’Toole – PhD student now in industry
- Peter Taylor – PhD student and Irish Research Council Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions COFUND postdoctoral fellow now a lecturer at Dublin City University
- Vojtěch Witzany – Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow and now faculty at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Charles University in Prague