Laura Cadonati and Tamara Bogdanović to Lead Center for Relativistic Astrophysics

Please join the College of Sciences in welcoming the new leadership of Georgia Tech’s Center for Relativistic Astrophysics (CRA). School of Physics professor Laura Cadonati will serve as CRA Director, and is joined by associate professor Tamara Bogdanović, who will serve as CRA Associate Director.

"The CRA has had numerous successes in recent years, including a critical role in the discovery of gravitational waves via the LIGO project and, in collaboration with colleagues in the Institute for Data Engineering and Science, the establishment of a new supercomputer at Georgia Tech," notes Susan Lozier, College of Sciences Dean and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair.

"In the coming years, a new interdisciplinary research neighborhood will be established in the Klaus Advanced Computing building for the purpose of bringing together astrophysicists and planetary scientists across the Institute," Lozier adds.

Cadonati joined the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Georgia Tech in January 2015. Her research interests include gravitational waves and particle astrophysics. In 2017, Cadonati was appointed as first-ever deputy spokesperson of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), to speak on behalf of LIGO when new gravitational wave detections are announced. She also oversees the management of a number of divisions, including data analysis and astrophysics. Cadonati leads LIGO’s collaboration with existing partners, such as astronomers and particle observatories around the world, and coordinates with current and future funding organizations.

Bogdanović is a theoretical astrophysicist whose research interests include the "ins and outs of some of the most massive black holes in the universe". Her research group investigates the physical processes that arise in accretion flows around supermassive black holes, and uses them as luminous tracers of these otherwise dark objects. Bogdanović's goal as a theorist is to predict the signatures of these interactions which can be searched for in observations, as well as to provide interpretation for some of the puzzling astrophysical events seen on the sky. Before joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 2012, she was a NASA sponsored Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland.

"I look forward to working with Laura and Tamara as they lead the CRA into a new phase of exciting research, education and outreach at Georgia Tech," shares Dean Lozier. "Congratulations to them both!"