I hold the Bert Elsbach Professorship at the Department of Physics and the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State and a member of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos. My CV provides an outline of where I have been and what I have been doing.
My coordinates are: Whitmore 312, bss25 AT psu.edu and postal address:

104 Davey Lab
Department of Physics
University Park PA 16802

I also hold a part time appointment at Cardiff University in the UK, where I spent 20 years before coming to Penn State in 2016, and an associate at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences.

The main focus of my research is to explore the Universe with gravitational waves. Predicted by Einstein in 1915, gravitational waves will help us probe the Universe inaccessible to particles and light. In the 90’s I developed a matched filtering approach to search for gravitational waves in data from interferometric gravitational-wave detectors as well as waveform models to use as search templates. These tools were used by the LIGO and Virgo Scientific Collaborations in their data analysis pipelines including the seminal discovery of binary black holes (e.g. GW150914) and  binary neutron stars (e.g. GW170817).

I have also developed new methods to test strong field predictions of dynamical gravity. We have routinely tested Einstein’s General Relativity using these methods and have found that Einstein is still right. With colleagues I have found how gravitational wave observations can be used to infer cosmological parameters, probe dense matter physics in neutron star cores and explore astrophysical scenarios of the formation and evolution of compact object binaries.

I am also interested in developing the science case for the next generation of gravitational-wave observatories, in particular the ground-based Cosmic Explorer and Einstein Telescope. These observatories will watch mergers from a time when the Universe was still in its infancy assembling the first stars, localize mergers of neutron stars in the nearby Universe with exquisite precision for electromagnetic follow-up observations and provide us a new tool for precision cosmology.

In another life I worked on the formation of large scale structure in the Universe and robust algorithms to characterize the geometry of structure using what we called Shape Statistics which turned out to be well-known mathematical descriptors called Minkowski Functionals.