After completion of my Bachelor’s in Theoretical Physics (Particle Physics) in Spain, I moved to Heidelberg to do a PhD in Theoretical Astrophysics, more precisely on dense stellar systems and the cosmic growth of supermassive black holes.

Later, I moved to the the Max Planck Institute of Gravitational Physics in Potsdam (also called the “Albert Einstein Institute'”, AEI) to work with the director, Prof. Dr. Bernard Schutz and Dr. Curt Cutler on General Relativity, in particular on Gravitational Wave Astronomy.

During my time in Barcelona, with Ignasi Ribas and Jordi Miralda-Escudé, I worked on the formation and evolution of protoplanetary disks, which later led to the development of a hybrid algorithm to study the formation and evolution of protoplanetary disks.

I then received an offer from the AEI in Potsdam to be a Senior Scientist in 2008 and after successfully raising a significant amount of third-party funding (i.e. not from the Max Planck Society), of about 800K EUR, I created my own Gravitational Wave Astronomy group at the AEI to host my 4 postdocs and 3 PhD students. I have recently delivered my habilitation at the University of Potsdam, close to the AEI.

The main goals of my research focus on sources of Gravitational Waves. The timing is excellent. GW Astronomy has recently become very appealing in view of the announcement of the first direct detection of a Gravitational Wave by Advanced LIGO in February 2016.

For me this discovery was important not “just” because we have got now a proof for the existence of GWs, but because I predicted last year the properties of the first Gravitational Wave ever detected: In a paper I submitted in 2015 which is accepted for publication, I anticipated that aLIGO would preferentially see binaries of black holes with the following properties: (i) masses between $30\,M_{\odot}$ and $100\,M_{\odot}$, (ii) low spin magnitudes, of around $a\lesssim 0.5$ and (iii) circular. This corresponds to the values of GW150914, the source observed. Moreover, there are other candidates, as released in the aLIGO paper, and it is likely that they have very similar characteristics, which will be a second test of my theory.

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