Jocelyn Read – Discovering the universe of gravitational waves
Talk details
- Date: 6 April 2025
- 1 p.m. (ET)
- Location: Zoom (Register for the event here)
Talk abstract
From the speaker:
“Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime that travel to us from some of the most extreme events in our universe, distant mergers of black holes and neutron stars. Observations of these events chart the history of stars through the collapsed remnants that are left behind at the end of their lives. Interpreting the patterns of their waves tells us about how these compact remnants orbit and spin, and can tell us how matter behaves at densities beyond that of an atomic nucleus. Mergers involving neutron stars are engines of transient astronomy, launching gamma-ray bursts and spreading newly created heavy elements into the universe. In this talk, I will tell some of the story of this new field of gravitational wave astronomy and show how our first detections are laying the groundwork for future observatories that can see across our entire universe.”
Presenter
Jocelyn Read is a professor of physics at California State University Fullerton in the Nicholas and Lee Begovich Center for Gravitational Wave Physics and Astronomy, and currently a visiting fellow at the Perimeter Institute. Her research connects the nuclear astrophysics of neutron stars with gravitational-wave observations. She earned her PhD in 2008 from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, where she developed a widely used model for dense matter inside neutron stars and produced first estimates of how gravitational waves from neutron star mergers would inform these properties. Her work has included proposed mechanisms for precursor flares in gamma-ray bursts, new methods for gravitational-wave cosmology, uncertainty quantification for neutron-star merger source modeling, and measurements of dense-matter properties with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo gravitational-wave observations. She is actively contributing to the development of the next-generation gravitational-wave observatory Cosmic Explorer.
Read co-chaired the LIGO/Virgo Binary Neutron Star Sources Working Group from 2014 to 2016 and was part of the team awarded the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the discovery of gravitational waves. She co-led the Extreme Matter team of the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra Collaboration from 2016 to 2022, through the first discovery and analysis of gravitational waves from a neutron-star merger. She has held visiting positions at the California Institute of Technology and the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena. Read chairs the Advisory Board for the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) and served on the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav). She was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2019.