Alexander Rawlings
I am a PhD student contributing to the ERC-funded project Ketju, and am funded by the University of Helsinki Research Foundation. My research has so far been focused on quantifying the sensitivity of numerical simulations of supermassive black hole (SMBH) binary dynamics to initial conditions, and the observable effects of gravitational wave-induced SMBH recoil. I am also an advocate for rigorous statistical modelling, and regularly employ techniques such as Bayesian hierarchical modelling and Gaussian process regression in my analysis workflow.
I completed my Master’s degree in astrophysics at the University of Helsinki, where my thesis was focused on the Final Parsec Problem in massive early-type galaxies. Prior to this, I completed an internship in observational extragalactic astrophysics at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy. I worked directly with data from the Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral Field Unit Spectrograph (SAMI) to investigate the relationship between the observational spin parameter of galaxies and their ellipticities. I obtained my Bachelor degree in physical sciences from the University of Southern Queensland in my native Australia.