Our research group at Carnegie Mellon focuses on multi-messenger analyses, mostly involving optical and near infrared observations of transients and galaxies and gravitational waves (GW) from compact object binaries detected by LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA. We are also involved in Supernova searches and cosmology, and in LISA sources studies.
Tomás Cabrera
Tomás is a graduate student at CMU who has developed a large portion of the DECam gravitational wave follow up analysis pipeline for the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA O4 run. He is also working on the association between GW binary black hole mergers and Active Galactic Nuclei.
Keerthi Kunnumkai
Keerthi is a graduate student at CMU working on simulations of GW events and modeling of kilonova lightcurves. She is also a main contributor to the DECam follow up, in particular for what concerns the observing strategy.
Ariel Jacob Amsellem
Ariel is a graduate student at CMU focusing on standard siren measurements with gravitational waves. He is developing a code that properly takes into account all selection effects and peculiar velocities for new bright standard siren measurements, and also uses DESI data for broader GW multimessenger analyses.
Ekaterine Dadiani
Eka is a graduate student at CMU working on searches for massive black hole binaries in DESI data. She is interested in sources that the space-based gravitational wave interferometer LISA will detect in the future.
Lei Hu, PhD
Lei is a postdoctoral researcher with broad experience in transient searches and supernova studies, photometry and difference imaging pipelines, and machine learning applications to astronomical datasets.
Brendan O’Connor, PhD
Brendan is a McWilliams Fellow. He is interested in the formation and evolution of high energy transients and their progenitors, with a specific focus on gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), binary neutron star mergers, and kilonovae. He utilizes telescopes covering X-ray, optical, and infrared wavelengths to study these fascinating explosions, and their merger environments. He is also interested in Galactic X-ray sources containing a compact object (a neutron star, black hole, or a white dwarf), such as high-mass X-ray binaries, magnetars, and magnetic cataclysmic variables.
Website link
Ignacio Magaña Hernandez, PhD
Ignacio is a McWilliams Fellow working on gravitational wave cosmology and strongly lensed gravitational waves.
William Ballard
William is a CMU undergraduate student working on dark standard siren analyses with LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA data and DESI galaxies. He has been awarded the 2023 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship to perform his research.
Aidan Catalano
Alumni:
Elise Kesler (University of Michigan): 2023 NSF AI SURP Summer student, DESIRT Transients modeling and classification with AI
Angela Thomas (CUNY): 2023 NSF Mellon College of Science Summer student, Studying strongly lensed gravitational waves
Michael Murphy (CMU): 2023 Undergraduate summer project.
Antonella Palmese 