Commissioning and developing LIGO instrumentation requires the application of a wide range of experimental techniques to solve subtle and difficult problems. My current project, the adaptive mode-matching system, can be simply described as “how do you move lenses to shape a laser beam – without touching them?”. We don’t have an answer yet, but we know it will involve feedback electronics, radio-frequency signal sensing, and thermal lensing – among other things!

With improved detector sensitivity, new gravitational wave sources will become accessible.  Gravitational wave signals can test general relativity in the strong field and provide another perspective on some of the most extreme environments in the universe. In my Ph.D. thesis, I developed a protocol for gravitational-wave based neutron star discovery targeting unassociated sources in the Fermi gamma-ray catalog.

Since I first encountered LIGO as an undergraduate student, I’ve been fascinated by the potential of complementary observations between gravitational waves and electromagnetic telescopes. Advanced LIGO is an important first step towards a robust, observational gravitational wave astronomy, and I’m proud to be a part of it.