Introduction

I am from Sestao, a historically industrial city in the area of the Greater Bilbao that we call Ezkerraldea, where I went to high-school prior to starting the undergraduate degree in Physics at the University of the Basque Country. In 2016 I moved to London to study an MSc in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces at Imperial College London and a PhD in Theoretical Physics at King’s College London. In October 2021 I joined the Astrophysics sub-department and the Queen’s College as Beecroft Fellow in Cosmology and an extraordinary Junior Research Fellow in Physics.

Teaching

I teach the Symmetry & Relativity (B2) and General Relativity (B5) tutorials to third year physics students at Queen’s. I also supervise master and PhD students in the Astrophysics department.

Research

My area of expertise is numerical relativity, which is the use of high-performance computing methods to solve Einstein’s equations of general relativity to study cosmological and astrophysical phenomena in the most extreme regimes of gravity. In short, I use computers to simulate some of the most catastrophic events in the Universe, such as the collision of black holes!

We are in a new era of gravitational physics in which both gravitational-wave measurements and cosmological observations can be used to test fundamental physics. Moreover, recent computational developments allow us to investigate (at present largely unexplored) regimes where the gravitational force is strong – a very promising area to search for new physics. At Queen’s, I am carrying a novel research program to explore how the gravitational waves that are produced in the most catastrophic events in the Universe can be used to answer some of the greatest outstanding questions in physics: How did the Universe begin? What is it made of?