I am a gravitational-wave astrophysicist

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.  
Picture

​            Publications here. Bio here.

News updates

January 14th 2021: Here is my interview with BBC World Service about the first "hint" of the gravitational-wave background in the NANOGrav 12.5-yr data!

At the AAS we presented the new gravitational-wave background results from the NANOGrav 12.5-yr data! Punchline: there is something there, but we're not yet convinced it's the background. We need more data! Press release here, 

I've co-authored a few new papers! 
  • Insights into searches for anisotropies in the nanohertz gravitational-wave background, Ali-Haïmoud, Smith, Mingarelli,  Paper 2!
    arXiv:2010.13958
  • Multimessenger pulsar timing array constraints on supermassive black hole binaries traced by periodic light curves, Xin, Mingarelli, Hazboun,  
    arXiv:2009.11865 
  • The NANOGrav 12.5-year Data Set: Search For An Isotropic Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background, Arzoumanian et al.,  
    arXiv:2009.04496 
  • Fisher formalism for anisotropic gravitational-wave background searches with pulsar timing arrays,  Ali-Haïmoud, Smith, Mingarelli, we call this Paper 1, arXiv:2006.14570 
  • Astrophysics Milestones For Pulsar Timing Array Gravitational Wave Detection, Pol et al.,  arXiv:2010.11950 

A few recent talks:
​
Nov 10th: Pheno & Vino Off-Shell seminar, Mariangela Lisanti group (Princeton)

Nov 9th: CU Boulder Colloquium

Oct 26th: CERN HEP Seminar

Oct 22nd: Copernicus Seminar

Oct 7th: Swarthmore Colloquium

Aug 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!

Interview with Megan Amram for Amy Poehler Smart Girls!

 

Last updated January 11th 2021