Mentor Search
Dr. Carl Haster
( University of Nevada, Las Vegas )
Contact
- Institution:University of Nevada, Las Vegas
- Departments: physics and astronomy
- Research Fields: Gravitation, Relativity, Black Holes, Neutron Stars, Gravitational Waves, Data Analysis, Cosmology
- Disciplines: Astrophysics, Physical Sciences
- Funding:NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NSF - National Science Foundation, UNLV - University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Mentoring
I have mentored and supervised both undergraduate and postgraduate student projects, both in-person at my home institution as well as remotely for students from collaboration institutions.
My mentoring experience goes back more than 8 years, all the way from when I was a PhD student, through being a postdoc and now as a junior faculty at UNLV.
I aim to propose student projects that will both aid the student in their broader learning process (teaching some new method/analysis, or introducing a new research topic) targeting their individual research background and experience, as well as projects that will ideally lead to a publication in a peer-reviewed journal (a goal that has been successful in the vast majority of stuent projects I’ve mentored).
Biography
I am an Assistant Professor of Astrophysics in the Department of Physics & Astronomy and the Nevada Center for Astrophysics at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Before this, I was a Postdoctoral Associate at the LIGO Laboratory and the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT, a CITA Postdoctoral Fellow at Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics a PhD student at University of Birmingham and a MPhys student at University of Manchester.
My main research interests are all the exciting things we can learn about the extremes of our Universe through observations of Gravitational Waves (for example using the current LIGO, or future Cosmic Explorer, instruments). I am particularly interested in finding satisfactory robust connections between the observed population of compact objects, mainly black holes and neutron stars, and the astrophysical processes through which these objects are formed and evolve. I am also interested in exploring matter at its extremes, like what can be found in coalescing neutron star binaries, how this can be observed using as many astrophysical messengers as possible and help us find the best model for the Neutron Star Equation of State. Finally, I enjoy working on the inference methods used to analyse these gravitational wave signals, in order to improve their speed, fidelity and robustness. This will in turn be crucial for using these observations for precision tests of General Relativity as our preferred theory of gravitation, as otherwise it’s easy to confuse a claimed beyondGR detection caused by a not-accurate-enough analysis.