SCIENTIFIC COLLABORATIONS

NASA LISA SCIENCE TEAM (NLST)

I am currently on NLST which was convened to assist the U.S. community in preparing for the 2020 astrophysics Decadal Survey and provide input to the Study Office and NASA HQ on the LISA mission. It consists of independent U.S. scientists with expertise in gravitational wave technologies, signal analysis, and astrophysics. I lead and participated in several white papers that were submitted for the Decadal Survey describing many open key questions in black hole physics that stand to be addressed by the LISA mission.

HUBBLE FRONTIER FIELDS (HFF)

One of the principal architects and lead of the map-making project for the the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields program, an initiative that produced images of six deep fields centered on strong lensing galaxy clusters drawn from  Abell catalog and the MACS survey, in parallel with six deep “blank fields” adjacent to these clusters. All the data and lensing mass models and maps produced by several independent groups are publicly available at Hubble Frontiers Fields Initiative website.  This project has generated some of the highest resolution maps of the dark matter distribution in cluster lenses.

Lenstool: Gravitational Lensing Modeling Software

CLUSTERS AS TELESCOPES (CATS)

PIs: Priyamvada Natarajan & Jean-Paul Kneib

Members: Mathilde Jauzac, Eric Jullo, Anson D’Aloisio, Johann Richard, Marceau Limousin, Jens Hjorth

Using nature’s telescopes – cluster-lenses – our goal is to study the detailed distribution of dark and luminous matter in clusters of galaxies as well as study the properties of the faint background galaxy populations that are brought into view by gravitational lensing. As part of a long term project to develop and implement modeling techniques, the publicly available package Lenstool: Gravitational Lensing Modeling Software is available here.

TCAN-MBH  THE MULTI-SCALE PHYSICS OF MASSIVE BLACK HOLES

PIs: Priyamvada Natarajan, Christopher Reynolds & Pablo Laguna

Members: Bhaskar Agarwal,  Angelo Ricarte, Tamara Bogdanovic, John Wise, Aycin Aykutalp,
Laura Blecha, Qi Ge,  Matthew Kunz, Cole Miller, Brian Morsony, KwangHo Park, Massimo Ricotti, Gareth Roberg-Clark, Michael Marchand Swisdak III, Hsiang-Yi Karen Yang