News

Freddy H. publishes his first paper – Congratulations!
Congratulations Freddy H! The paper “Black-hole hair from vector dark matter accretion” can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1103/v425-4yvq

Noora Takes Qualifying Examination – Good job!
Good job Noora!

Yi joins Hector O. Silva’s research group at UIUC – Good luck!
We all wish Yi the best of luck in her graduate studies in Hector’s group!

List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent (SP 2025) – Congratulations!
C. Cheng, F. Pardoe, C. Richards, and H. Witek were placed on the list of teachers ranked as excellent for Spring 2025, congratulations!

Domenica Garzon wins the ICASU Physics Graduate Fellowship
Domenica won the ICASU Physics Graduate Fellowship. We are collaborating with professors and students from the research groups of Prof. Helvi Witek and Prof. Smitha Vishveshwara to develop a unified framework for superradiance, exploring analogies between black holes and quantum many-body systems. The project combines advanced mathematics and machine learning to predict signals that could reveal new particles and test gravity.

E=mc2 hackathon
Our group is hosting the inaugural working workshop / hackathon of our “E=mc2” NSF Award at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications from 4-14 August 2025. We will implement new functionalities in CarpetX, and neutrino transport schemes in codes based on CarpetX such as AsterX. We collaborate with colleagues from RIT, UT Austin, LSU, U Idaho, Perimeter Institute, UBC and the University of Amsterdam. We look forward to productive two weeks!

Jay Kalinani joins our group
Jay Kalinani is joining the Witek Gravity group as a postdoctoral researcher. Jay will be working with us on neutrino transport schemes for neutron star mergers, and on the new software AsterX, nuX, CarpetX and CanudaX. Welcome, Jay!

Cheng-Hsin – internship at OakRidge National Lab
Cheng-Hsin is pursuing an internship at OakRidge National Lab.

Deborah is starting a faculty position at the University of Rhode Island
Deborah Ferguson is leaving the group (July 2025) to start a faculty position at the University of Rhode Island. Congratulations and Have a fantastic start in your new position, Deborah!

Roland Haas joins the University of British Columbia
Roland Haas is joining the University of British Columbia to work on the CHIME experiment. CHIME is a radiotelescope
without any moving parts using high-speed computer calculations to
interferometrically point to multiple locations on the sky at the same
time. CHIME science goals include measurement of imprints the
baryon-acoustic oscillations, as well as fast radio transients, having
discovered 39 such sources, more than any other experiment. Roland will
help CHIME upgrade its software stack to new compute hardware to
increase the precision and number of detections made.

Undergraduate student Derek Zeng receives 2025 Ralph O. Simmons Undergraduate Research Scholarship.
Undergraduate student Derek Zeng has been selected to receive a 2025 Ralph O. Simmons Undergraduate Research Scholarship to support his summer research work this year with Dr. Elena Koptieva. The award is named in honor of Professor Ralph O. Simmons, who gave a very generous endowment to allow talented undergraduate physics students to undertake hands-on summer research projects.

PhD student Domenica Garzon is the People’s Choice winner for Fall 2024.
PhD student Domenica Garzon is the People’s Choice winner for Fall 2024! Her article on vertical action in galaxies received the most votes of the articles submitted that term.

Chloe Richards, Alexandru Dima, Deborah Ferguson, and Helvi Witek publish paper – Congratulations!
Congratulations all! The paper “Growing black-hole hair in nonminimally coupled biscalar gravity” can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.111.124039

Witek group goes to APS Global Physics (March 2025).
Members of the Witek group travelled to Anaheim, California for the 2025 American Physical Society Global Physics summit. PI Helvi Witek, Postdoc Deborah Ferguson, Research scholar Elena Koptieva, PhD students Freddy Hancock, Domenica Garzon, Noora Ghadiri, Chloe Richards, Freddy Pardoe and undergraduate students Udit Ohri, Yi Zhang presented their research at the conference.

PI Helvi Witek and PhD student Chloe Richards perform in Quantum Jubilee.
PI Helvi Witek and PhD student Chloe Richards perform in “Cosmic Whispers: Shared Voices” as a part of the public outreach event Quantum Jubilee in Anaheim California to celebrate the year of the quantum.

Postdoc Deborah Ferguson to join the University of Rhode Island as an Assistant Professor.
Postdoc Deborah Ferguson will be joining the University of Rhode Island as an assistant professor of Astrophysics this upcoming fall. Read more here.

Postdoc Deborah Ferguson attends the APS Annual Leadership Meeting and Congressional Visits Day (2025).
As a member-at-large on the APS Division of Gravity executive committee, Deborah had the opportunity to travel to Washington D.C. for the APS Annual Leadership Meeting. This was an excellent opportunity to discuss the challenges and opportunities faced by physicists within APS and how leadership can best foster engagement and support throughout the community. The day before the conference, together with a team of researchers, Deborah also went to the capitol to meet with Congressional staffers to advocate for physics.

Prof. Helvi Witek elected to the Physics Department Faculty Advisory Committee (2025):
Prof. Helvi Witek has been elected to the Physics Department Faculty Advisory Committee (FAC). The FAC functions to support the faculty of the University.

PhD Student Chloe Richards APS DGRAV election (2025):
PhD student Chloe Richards has been elected as a student representative on the APS DGRAV executive committee.

PhD Student Awarded Discover Grant (2024):
PhD student Domenica Garzon, in collaboration with Prof. Helvi Witek and Dr. Roland Haas, has been awarded a Discover Grant. This grant, obtained through the ACCESS allocation system, will support their cutting-edge research in Gravitational Physics. The project leverages high-performance computing resources to advance the study of black hole dynamics. Learn more about the allocation system here: ACCESS Allocations: Prepare Requests

PhD Student  Wins Prestigious AAUW Doctoral Fellowship (2024):
PhD student Domenica Garzon for receiving the highly esteemed AAUW Fellowship. This fellowship recognizes her research in theoretical physics, with a focus on general relativity and black hole dynamics. The AAUW Fellowship highlights Domenica’s dedication to advancing women in STEM fields.

CarpetX hackathon (July 2024) hosted at NCSA
The 2-week CarpetX hackathon/working workshop was successfully hosted at NCSA, bringing together 14 CarpetX developers from UIUC, Perimeter Institute, Louisiana State University, Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Idaho, and University of Texas at Austin. Together the team advanced the core functionalities and physics modules for CarpetX, including spacetime evolution, GRMHD, subcycling in time, multi-patch coordinate system, code generation, and more.

Deborah gives plenary talk at 15th International LISA Symposium in Dublin, Ireland (July 2024):
The LISA Symposium is held every two years, bringing together hundreds of scientists from around the globe to discuss topics related to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. The first since the official adoption of LISA as an ESA mission, this year’s symposium was held in Dublin, Ireland in July. Deborah Ferguson was invited to give a plenary talk on the challenges facing numerical relativity as we prepare for the unprecedented sensitivity of LISA.

Chloe Richards gives invited talk at New Frontiers in Strong Gravity workshop in Benasque, Spain (July 2024):
Graduate student, Chloe Richards, is invited to present her work studying the evolution of scalar fields evolving in black hole spacetimes in a talk titled, “Black holes simulations in axi-dilaton gravity”. 

Chloe Richards passes preliminary exams (May 2024):
Third-year graduate student, Chloe Richards, passes preliminary examination after presenting her work completed as a part of her graduate research titled “Black hole simulations in quadratic gravity”, officially becoming a PhD candidate.

Frederick Pardoe passes preliminary exams (April 2024):
Third-year graduate student, Frederick Pardoe, passes preliminary examination after presenting work completed as a part of his graduate research titled “Quadratic Scalar Gauss-Bonnet Gravity in Close Encounters and Anti-de Sitter Space”, officially becoming a PhD candidate.

Witek group goes to APS (April 2024) :
Members of the Witek group travelled to Sacramento for the 2024 American Physical Society April Meeting. PhD students Freddy Hancock, Noora Ghadiri, Chloe Richards, Freddy Pardoe, Domenica Garzon, and Cheng-Hsin Cheng presented their research at the conference. 

Cheng-Hsin Cheng passes preliminary exams (February 2024):
Fourth-year graduate student, Cheng-Hsin Cheng, passes preliminary examination after presenting his work completed as a part of his graduate research titled “Impact of ultra-light scalars on binary black holes”, officially becoming a PhD candidate.

Chloe Richards, Alexandru Dima, and Helvi Witek publish paper – Congratulations!
Congratulations to all and to Chloe for her first paper as a graduate student! The paper “Black holes in massive dynamical Chern-Simons gravity: Scalar hair and quasibound states at decoupling” can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.108.044078