Physicist Keefe Mitman, selected as an Einstein Fellow in the prestigious NASA Hubble Fellowship Program, has chosen to do his research at Cornell University, working with Nils Deppe, assistant professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).
The Hubble Fellowship Program enables outstanding postdoctoral scientists to pursue independent research in any area of NASA astrophysics at a U.S. institution of their choice; each fellowship provides the awardee up to three years of support.
Mitman will continue his previous collaboration with Deppe and the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Collaboration on improving gravitational wave models to aid with the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra Collaboration’s detection and characterization of compact binary encounters.
“In particular, I will work on building the most accurate model to contain an intriguing effect known as the gravitational wave memory effect, which we expect to observe for the first time in the next five years,” said Mitman. “Observing this effect in the near future will help probe not only the nonlinear nature of general relativity, but perhaps even the structure of our universe and the nature of quantum gravity.”
Mitman earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from Columbia University in 2019 and his Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 2024. At Caltech, he studied black holes, gravitational waves and numerical relativity with Saul Teukolsky, Hans A. Bethe Professor Emeritus of Physics (A&S) and the SXS Collaboration.
