I Think About Black Holes

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Yara Mingarelli: There's never enough talk about black holes. I agree. And so it's a real sort of honest combination of theoretical work and good old observational work. That's how we learn about the universe, so that's why you're at the right place.

The detection of gravitational waves from inspiraling black holes by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations was rightly celebrated as a landmark achievement in physics and astronomy. But ultra-precise ground-based observatories aren’t the only way to detect gravitational waves; we can also search for their imprints on the timing of signals from pulsars scattered throughout our galaxy. Chiara Mingarelli is a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration, which uses pulsar timing to study the universe using gravitational waves.

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Chiara Mingarelli received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Birmingham. She is currently an assistant professor of physics at the University of Connecticut and a research scientist at the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Astrophysics. Her Ph.D. thesis was selected by Springer Nature as an Outstanding PhD thesis, and she was selected as a “Voice of the Future” by the Royal Astronomical Society. She regularly contributes to science communication, including Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls and the Science Channel’s “How the Universe Works."

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