William East

Gravitational Physics

Curriculum Vitae

A pdf version of my full CV can be found here.

Education

  1. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ USA
    1. Ph.D., Physics, September 2013
      • Adviser: Professor Frans Pretorius
    2. M.A., Physics, January 2010
  2. Stanford University, Stanford, CA USA
    1. B.S., Mathematics and Physics, June 2008
      • with Honors in Physics, Conferred with Distinction

Employment

  1. Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, ON Canada
    1. Senior Faculty October 2023 to present
    2. Junior Faculty January 2018 to September 2023
    3. Director's Fellow September 2016 to December 2017
  2. Physics and Astronomy Department, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON Canada
    1. Adjunct Faculty January 2018 to present
  3. Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University, Menlo Park, CA USA
    1. Postdoctoral Fellow September 2013 to August 2016

Awards

  1. International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation
    1. Jürgen Ehlers Thesis Prize for an Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis in Mathematical and Numerical Relativity, 2016
  2. American Physical Society
    1. Nicholas Metropolis Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational Physics, 2015
  3. Princeton University
    1. Ray Grimm Memorial Prize in Computational Physics, 2013
  4. National Science Foundation
    1. Graduate Research Fellowship, 2008-2011
  5. Stanford University
    1. Deans' Award for Academic Accomplishment, 2008
    2. President's Award for Academic Excellence, 2005

Selected Publications

  1. See the arxiv for an up-to-date list.
    1. W.E. East "Cosmic censorship upheld in spheroidal collapse of collisionless matter", Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 231103 (2019)
    2. W.E. East and F. Pretorius "Superradiant instability and backreaction of massive vector fields around Kerr black holes", Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 041101 (2017)
    3. W.E. East, J. Kearney, B. Shakya, H. Yoo, and K.M. Zurek "Spacetime dynamics of a Higgs vacuum instability during inflation", Phys. Rev. D 95, 023526 (2017)
    4. W.E. East, M. Kleban, A. Linde, and L. Senatore "Beginning inflation in an inhomogeneous universe", JCAP 09 (2016) 010
    5. W.E. East, V. Paschalidis, F. Pretorius, and S.L. Shapiro "Relativistic simulations of eccentric binary neutron star mergers: One-arm spiral instability and effects of neutron star spin", Phys. Rev. D 85, 124009 (2016)
    6. W.E. East, J. Zrake, Y. Yuan, and R.D. Blandford "Spontaneous decay of periodic magnetostatic equilibria", Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 095002 (2015)
    7. W.E. East, F. Pretorius, and B.C. Stephens "Eccentric black hole-neutron star mergers: Effects of black hole spin and equation of state", Phys. Rev. D 85, 124009 (2012)