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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. 
News updatesAug 31st: First day of class! Welcome PHYS 2701 students! Your materials are on HuskyCT.
... COVID ... 18 February 2020 : Secret Science Club talk on gravitational-wave detection with NANOGrav (Brooklyn, NY). [Thanks for everyone who attended! Estimates at 400+ people, amazing!] 11 February 2020: My colleagues and I find a new solution to the final parsec problem for a class of supermassive black holes, detectable with LISA. "Accelerated orbital decay of supermassive black hole binaries in merging nuclear star clusters", Ogiya et al. (2020), in press. December 2019: Very excited that my collaboration with Katie Breivik and Shane Larson is now live! "Constraining Galactic Structure with the LISA White Dwarf Foreground", Breivik, Mingarelli, Larson (submitted to ApJ). November 2019: My colleagues and I have a new paper which was long in the making: Understanding Omega_gw in gravitational wave experiments. (Mingarelli et al. 2019). Here we explain why somewhat mysterious factors of 5 in the definition of Omega_gw are floating around in the literature. July 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! January 2019: An invited review on pulsar timing arrays for Nature Astronomy, "Probing supermassive black hole mergers and stalling with pulsar timing arrays" 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. |
Interview with Megan Amram for Amy Poehler Smart Girls! |