University of Guelph - Department of Physics
A unifying theme of my research is the pursuit to connect fundamental physics with the cosmos. I am excited about multimessenger and gravitational-wave astronomy with Advanced LIGO and Virgo and its partner facilities in the electromagnetic band and the neutrino/high-energy particle sector. My research interests cover a broad range of topics including gravitational physics, nuclear astrophysics, high-energy astrophysics, and transient astronomy. Much of my research centers around unraveling the fundamental physics and astrophysics of compact binary mergers involving neutron stars, it elucidates how such mergers and other astrophysical phenomena synthesize heavy elements in the Universe via the rapid neutron capture process, and it reflects on the broader impacts for nuclear physics and astrophysics, and the consequences for cosmology. In order to study these prime targets of multi-messenger astronomy, I perform fully general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of astrophysical systems on supercomputers, including microphysical equations of state, weak interactions, neutrino radiation transport, and nuclear reaction networks, in combination with analytical and semi-analytical modeling.