Congratulations to CITA Postdoctoral Fellow Aditya Vijaykumar who recently received two distinctions of excellence for his PhD thesis “Probing gravity, astrophysics, and cosmology with gravitational waves“! These are the 2024 Justice Oak Award for Outstanding thesis in Astronomy by the Astronomical Society of India and the 2024 V. V. Narlikar Best Thesis Award by the Indian Association for General Relativity and Gravitation.
Dr. Vijaykumar’s thesis developed new techniques to extract valuable information from compact binary sources detected through gravitational waves. These include (i) constraining the time-variation of Newton’s gravitational constant, (ii) probing compact binaries in dense environments such as the vicinity of supermassive black holes, and (iii) using compact binaries as tracers of large-scale structure in the Universe.
At CITA, Dr. Vijaykumar is studying the host environments of gravitational-wave sources and other transients and developing new methods for fast and robust analysis of gravitational-wave data.
Dr. Vijaykumar’s research has been published in established journals such as the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics and The Astrophysical Journal.