My primary resarch focus now is on interpreting gravitational-wave observations to learn more about massive binary evolution. Gravitational-wave observations allow us to probe the short, brilliant, turbulent, but somewhat secretive lives of massive stars. Like a paleontologist who uses the skeletons of dinosaurs to discover what living dinosaurs looked like, we can begin to probe the evolutionary history of massive stars by observing their compact remnants, merging pairs of black holes. My group is developing a dedicated code for Compact Object Mergers: Population Astrophysics Statistics in order to model compact binary evolution and compare results to observations. I recently wrote an accessible summary and a colloquium-style review with Alison Farmer.

Other key recent research achievements include:

• Gravitational-wave observations

  I am proud to have played a role in the LIGO gravitational-wave discovery of binary black hole mergers.

• Massive binary evolution

  With collaborator Selma de Mink, we developed the chemically homogeneous evolutionary channel for the formation of binary black holes. Our mock data catalogs are publicly available.

  My research students who comprise the COMPAS team demonstrated that the first LIGO discoveries are also consistent with forming through classical binary evolution via a common envelope phase.

• Dynamics

  With Yuri Levin, we predicted that 5 to 10 percent of tidal disruptions of stars by massive black holes in galactic centers will be double disruption events. Meanwhile, binaries slowly diffusing into the galactic center are more likely to merge, possibly explaining the observed absence of a high-velocity tail of hypervelocity stars.

• Astrostatistics

  My group has developed and improved methods for inference (e.g., parallel tempering in Markov Chain Monte Carlo, kD interpolation for stochastic jump proposals, improved deterministic sampling), investigated measurement accuracy on gravitational waves from intermediate mass ratio inspirals and intermediate mass black hole binaries.

  We have also worked on population statistics, including counting amid confusion and clustering and classification. Recent applications include the hierarchical modeling of observed black hole spin distributions.