Multi-messenger Gravitational Lensing

Dr Graham Smith, University of Birmingham, UK

Graham Smith is Reader of Cosmology and Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow in the University of Birmingham's School of Physics and Astronomy. He led the first peer reviewed article on the gravitational lensing interpretation of LIGO's gravitational wave detections in 2018. He also led the study that demonstrates the feasibility of multi-messenger gravitational lensing in the mid-2020s. He is a founding member of the LSST:UK consortium through which UK scientists participate in the Rubin/LSST science collaborations, co-chairs Rubin/LSST's Strong Lensing Science Collaboration (SLSC), and leads the LSST:UK and SLSC contributions to Rubin commissioning.

Dr Tessa Baker, Queen Mary University of London, UK

Tessa Baker is a cosmologist and gravitational wave astronomer. Her research centres on testing the laws of gravity that govern the universe on the very largest scales. She is interested in both new theoretical ideas about dark energy, and testing them with the latest electromagnetic and gravitational wave observations.

Tessa completed her training at Oxford, before moving to Queen Mary University of London (via a brief stop in Philadelphia) for a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. In 2023 she moved to join the ICG at Portsmouth. 

She is strongly involved in the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, the LISA consortium and the Vera Rubin Observatory, leading various groups focusing on tests of fundamental physics.

When not working, she still likes to test gravity by hiking up large things.

Assistant Professor Simon Birrer, Stony Brook University, USA

Simon Birrer is an Assistant Professor at Stony Brook, New York. Prior, he was a Kavli Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University (2019-2022) and a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles. Birrer received his PhD from ETH Zurich in 2016. Birrer is primary using gravitational lensing, a phenomena described by general relativity. Birrer’s group is actively developing open-source advanced computational and statistical tools to extract detailed and robust information from strong lensing about the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

Dr Matt Nicholl, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Matt is a Reader in Astrophysics at Queen’s University Belfast. He obtained his PhD from QUB in 2015. He has since been a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, a Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and an assistant/associate professor at the University of Birmingham, before returning to QUB. His research interests span a wide range of energetic and explosive transients, in particular kilonovae, superluminous supernovae and tidal disruption events. He is particularly interested in what early detection and classification from all-sky surveys and modelling of large samples can reveal about the compact objects that power these extreme events.

Professor Ariel Goobar, Stockholm University, Sweden

Ariel Goobar is the director of the Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics in Stockholm and a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. He started his scientific career as a PhD student in experimental particle physics, searching for the Higgs boson at CERN. In 1992, he changed field to observational cosmology, as he joined the supernova cosmology group led by Perlmutter in Berkeley, the SCP team that eventually discovered the accelerated expansion of the Universe. For that work he shared the Gruber prize and the Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics with the SCP team members. During the 1990’s, he also worked on the AMANDA neutrino telescope, the precursor of IceCube. In recent years, Goobar has been leading the search for gravitationally lensed supernovae with ground-based facilities, most notably at the Palomar Observatory.