School of Natural Sciences

Massive black holes (MBHs) exist at the centers of many dense star systems, particularly in galactic nuclei.  Steady accretion onto MBHs powers active galactic nuclei, but dynamical processes near MBHs can generate various forms of transient...

I will present a program of extracting cosmological information by combining effective field theory (EFT) techniques with data from spectroscopic galaxy surveys. I will highlight previous successes of this program and share recent results, including...

I will discuss the path integral of pure 3D gravity on a finite region of spacetime, with boundary conditions that fix dihedral angles or geodesic lengths. This amplitude calculates corrections to the Gaussian statistics of OPE coefficients in the...

I will explain how the irreversibility of the renormalization group together with anomalies, including anomalies in the space of coupling constants, can be used to constrain the IR phases of defects in familiar quantum field theories. As an example...

In the era of high-dimensional data and simulation-based science, machine learning is transforming the different stages of the scientific method in astrophysics. I will present a summary of my research connected to generative models in two main...

Recent breakthroughs in gravitational wave and electromagnetic observations have given better and better insights into black holes and extreme gravity. While one usually thinks of black holes as the unyielding final state of gravitational collapse...

In the past decade, we have detected hundreds of gravitational waves, advancing our understanding of the Universe and its governing laws. In this talk, I will present the theoretical models and data analysis tools I have developed for interfacing...

LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA have recently announced the discovery of over 200 new compact binary mergers in low latency during their fourth observing run (O4), a majority of which are stellar-mass binary black hole mergers. The first segment of this run...

Drawing inspiration from AdS/CFT holography, I will discuss the idea that a static patch in de Sitter space admits a fundamental description based upon standard quantum mechanics. Taking a bottom-up perspective, I compute correlation functions of...