Robert Owen

Biography

I work at the interface of gravitation theory, astrophysics, and computation. Most of my research is with the SXS collaboration, with which I was directly involved as a graduate student at Caltech, and as a postdoc at Cornell. We use supercomputers to solve Einstein's field equations of general relativity to model the collisions of black holes and neutron stars, which are important sources of gravitational waves. This modeling is crucial for detection of these waves, and for the eventual astrophysical interpretation of such detections. Modeling of these systems also provides a convenient testing ground for understanding more basic open questions about the nature of the classical gravitational field.