Prof. Patrick Brady

(he/him/his)
Patrick Brady is the director of the CGCA. He is active in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Collaboration and Zwicky Transient Facility projects.

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Patrick Brady

Assoc. Prof. Phil Chang

Phil Chang's research interests include supernovae, compact objects, disk dynamics, plasma astrophysics, and turbulent star formation. In general terms, he is interested in various aspects of theoretical astrophysics and cosmology.

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Phil Chang


Prof. Dawn Erb

(she/her/hers)
Dawn Erb studies the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe with large optical and infrared telescopes, with particular focus on low mass, low metallicity galaxies and the early stages of galaxy evolution. She conducts observations of the kinematics, chemical evolution and stellar populations of galaxies at high redshift, and of interactions between galaxies and their surrounding gas. She also leads the Milwaukee Urban Observatory.

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Dawn Erb

Prof. David Kaplan

(he/him/his)
David Kaplan's research concerns multi-wavelength (radio, infrared, optical, X-ray) observations of a variety of types of compact objects: neutron stars, white dwarfs, and black holes. He is working on detecting radio transients with the Murchison Widefield Array and the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, along with gravitational wave transients and new binaries with the Zwicky Transient Facility. He is a member of NANOGrav and the Green Bank North Celestial Cap pulsar survey.

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David Kaplan


Asst. Prof. Sarah Vigeland

(she/her/hers)
Sarah Vigeland uses gravitational waves and electromagnetic observations to study compact objects, from white dwarfs and neutron stars to supermassive black holes. She is active in the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav).

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Sarah Vigeland

Assoc. Prof. Alan Wiseman

Alan Wiseman's research is in the area of general relativity and gravitation with a special emphasis in gravitational-wave generation and detection. He has published a number of papers involving computations of the expected gravitational-wave signals from inspiraling binary star systems using post-Newtonian theory. He also works in the area of black hole perturbation theory and the radiation reaction problem in curved space time. He is active in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Collaboration.

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Alan Wiseman

Emeritus Faculty

Distinguished Prof. John Friendman

John Friedman has worked on a broad range of problems in gravitational physics and relativistic astrophysics, involving neutron stars, black holes, gravitational waves from compact binaries, the topology of spacetime, and topological questions in quantum gravity.

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John Friedman

Distinguished Prof. Leonard Parker

Leonard Parker is a founding member and former director of the UWM Center For Gravitation And Cosmology. He was first to show that quantum field theory implies particle creation in curved spacetimes. This process creates particles and amplifies small perturbations in an expanding universe. The observed features of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation and of the large-scale structure of the present universe confirm that this particle creation process in an in inflationary universe was responsible for the CMB temperature anisotropies and for the clumping of matter that gave rise to galaxies and galactic clusters.
Parker was first (with S. A. Fulling) to develop the method of adiabatic regularization in curved spacetime. He was also first to calculate the perturbations of the spectra of one-electron atoms in arbitrary gravitational fields in terms of the Riemann tensor.
He is one of the authors of the book Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime.

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Leonard Parker