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I am a gravitational-wave astrophysicist
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I am a gravitational-wave astrophysicist, looking to understand how supermassive black holes in the centers of massive galaxies merge, if at all. I do this by predicting their nanohertz gravitational-wave signatures, which will soon be detected by pulsar timing array experiments. With pulsar timing data, I look for both individual supermassive black holes in binary systems, and for the gravitational-wave background which should be generated by their cosmic merger history.
I am an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, and an associate research scientist at the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) at the Flatiron Institute. Before joining the CCA I was a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellow at Caltech and at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. I completed my PhD in 2014 at the University of Birmingham (UK) with Alberto Vecchio. If you're ineterested to find out more, check out my guest blog post for Scientific American. Publications here. Bio here. News updatesJuly 2019: New! Discovery of a Close-separation Binary Quasar at the Heart of a z ~ 0.2 Merging Galaxy and Its Implications for Low-frequency Gravitational Waves
These black holes are so big and so awesome that they got their own press release! 18 December: New paper with Lauren Anderson, Megan Bedell and David Spergel, "Improving Binary Millisecond Pulsar Distances with Gaia" Here we improve distances to millisecond pulsars by using its companion's Gaia parallax measurement. Useful for tests of GR, GW detection, and more! All codes on GitHub, https://github.com/ChiaraMingarelli/gaia_pulsars,. 6 September: Congratulations Prof. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell on winning a special Breakthrough Prize! Prof. Bell Burnell will use the prize money to fund PhD studentships for minority groups, including refugees. My comments made to Nature here. 17 August: New paper in collaboration with Ciarán Conneely and Andrew Jaffe! On the Amplitude and Stokes Parameters of a Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background, arXiv: 1808.05920 25 July: Filiming How the Universe Works, Season 7, in NYC. 18 June: Proving the short-wavelength approximation in Pulsar Timing Array gravitational-wave background searches, Mingarelli & Mingarelli (2018), arXiv:1806.06979 15-20 June: IPTA Meeting, teaching at student summer school, New Mexico 16-24 May: Visiting colleagues at IAP (Paris), gave a talk. 16 April: TAC seminar at University of California, Berkeley. 17- 21 March: Amazon MARS event, Palm Springs 27 Feb: Giving a talk at NYU at 2pm on the future of gravitational-wave astronomy with pulsar timing arrays. Dec 6-8: Harvard CfA Colloquium and lunch talk. 13 Nov: My new Nature Astronomy paper was published today! Check out the front page of NASA JPL for the press release, and also one by the Simons Foundation. Nature article here, arXiv preprint here. 25 Sep: Joining the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York (NY). 15 Aug - 15 Sep: Visiting Imperial College London 3-7 July: International Pulsar Timing Array Meeting in Paris, France 11 May: Very honored to receive the MSCA 2017 "Communicating Science" Prize! 28 April: Gravity group lunch seminar, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ (USA) 12-13 April: Colloquium at Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO (USA) |
Interview with Megan Amram for Amy Poehler Smart Girls! |