Research Projects

2023-09 – present

The fourth observing run of the international network of gravitational wave detectors places us on the cusp of a new era for gravitational wave astronomy. Detectors have now reached very high levels of sensitivity, and as a result the number of detections which are made each month has increased well-beyond what was possible less than five years ago. The detection rate will continue to increase in the coming years as the detectors approach and reach their design sensitivity. While this presents many new avenues for research, the substantially increased number of signals pose a considerable challenge to analysts. The fourth observing run represents a unique opportunity to test the new techniques which I, and my colleagues internationally, have been developing to rise to this challenge, allowing events to be analysed in an automated manner. This will allow a much larger number of events to be analysed than has previously been possible while maintaining the very high levels of quality assosciated with the international gravitational wave community's results.

2023-06 – present

As the field of gravitational wave detection has matured the detection of signals in detector data which could plauibly represent the effects of gravitational waves has increased, along with our confidence in understanding these signals. This opens the possibilities of examining more closely signals which lie deep in the noise from detectors, which will test our ability to distinguish very quiet signals from signal-like noise. This also brings-together many other regions of research, including finding efficient ways to analyse this potentially bountiful new source of data, and deal with the more complex needs of analysing less "clean" signals.

2020-02 – present

Modern gravitational wave analysis can involve multiple analysis pipelines operating over dozens or even hundreds of events. Managing this at scale is a challenge; asimov is designed to simplify the construction and monitoring of analyses.

2018 – present

Gravitational waves are produced any time a mass accelerates, including when an object changes the direction it's travelling in. When massive black holes travelling at high velocities pass close to each other, their mutual gravitational attraction deflects their trajectories, producing a gravitational effect analogous to Bremsstrahlung. The burst signals produced by these encounters may be detectable with current gravitational-wave observatories.

2016 – present

Using gravitational-wave observations of binary neutron star mergers to place constraints on the opening angles of gamma-ray burst jets, through Bayesian comparison of the GW and electromagnetic detection rates.

2016-01 – present

Minke is a Python package for creating simulated gravitational-wave signals for use in testing and validating gravitational-wave searches. It provides a clean, pythonic interface to a wide range of signal morphologies, from simple ad-hoc burst waveforms to physically motivated models of astrophysical transients.

2015 – present

Understanding the waveform for a binary black hole coalescence is important for a number of data analysis tasks in gravitational wave astronomy, including parameter estimation and testing General Relativity. Producing precise waveforms is slow and computationally intensive, however. This project involves the development of accurate surrogate models which can be used in Bayesian inference.

2013 – present  

An attempt to use Bayesian inference to find flaring events in data from the Kepler mission.