Luisa T. Buchman, Affiliate Assistant Professor
Biography
Dr. Buchman received her Ph.D. in Astronomy and her Master’s in Physics from the University of Washington Seattle in 2003. Her doctoral research, in the field of numerical relativity, was supervised by Prof. James Bardeen. Afterward, she continued her research with a National Research Council Research Associate award at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, with Dr. Frank Estabrook. During this time, she joined the numerical relativity group at Caltech, participating in an exciting collaboration whose research was pivotal in the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015. She joined Dr. Joey Key’s Gravitational Wave Astronomy group in the summer of 2019, and became an Affiliate Assistant Professor at UW Bothell later that year.
Research
Dr. Buchman is interested in the most extreme regions of space-time distortion: the collision and mergers of binary black hole systems. She strives to understand (using mathematics) and simulate (using computers) the gravitational wave signals produced by these events. As part of the Gravitational Wave Astronomy group at the UW and the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes collaboration (via Caltech), she aims to contribute to the detection and interpretation of gravitational waves from LIGO and other ground-based gravitational wave observatories.
Education
University of Washington
Seattle, WA
- Ph.D. Astronomy
- M.S. Physics
- M.S. Astronomy
Harvard-Radcliffe College
Cambridge, MA
- A.B. Biochemical Sciences
Contact
Location:
DISC-476
Phone:
Email:
lbuchman@uw.edu
Courses
- Introductory Physics labs