August 26, 2025
New Gravitational-Wave Results from LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA (GWTC-4) are out — and here’s what I love about them 
with LIGO Laboratory
. So many amazing results, beautiful plots, and exciting insights! 
I also put together a (very biased!) astrophysics-focused summary of some key highlights from the papers here: 
August 21, 2025
Feeling beyond honored to work with so many talented students at the School of Physical Sciences, UC San Diego ✨✨ 🙇♀️ Incl. this amazing group during the summer: in photos 📸 : Suoi-Nguon Pham, Amedeo Romagnolo (co-advisor), Esther Park, Manasvini Komandur, Laya Binu, Feranmi Falodun, Saina Kadni & additionally: Matthew McCall, Alexis Vazquez, Eugene Shang, Meera Desawale, Khushi Karthikeyan, Cauã Rodrigues, Angel Hernandez, Hanan Sayes + grad students Ana Lam, Sasha Levina, Alexander Migala, Tyler Smith, & Shasha Arani who served as wonderful mentors
Aug 20, 2025
[Summer student highlight] Meet Manasvini Komandur 💫 :
A rising junior with a Physics/Astro major at UCSD. She received the UCSD STARS Fellowship this summer and has been working with her advisor, Tyler Smith (PhD student at UCI), and me on investigating “mass ratio reversals” (when the more massive black hole forms from the initially less massive star). ✨ Here is a fantastic plot that she made & some pictures from her fantastic presentation last week 🤩 😎
August 13, 2025 [Summer student highlight] Meet Feranmi Falodun:
Feranmi is an undergraduate Computer Engineering student at California State University, East Bay. She received the CalBridge Fellowship this summer and has been working on a project that analyzes the binary black hole merger rates and their properties across redshift using Startrack as part of our Gravitational-wave Paleontology group at the Astronomy department @UC San Diego School of Physical Sciences. In just a few weeks, she has already discovered some amazing r
esults about which stars can form the binary black holes observed by LIGO Laboratory and VIRGO. She is presenting her results this Wednesday at the SRC conference. Feranmi Falodun will be applying for PhD programs this fall, so keep an eye out for her application! 🤩 😎
Aug 5, 2025
Next Wednesday several of our group members will present at UCSD’s SRC conference. A list of presentations/presenters is below:
Full Schedule https://ugresearch.ucsd.edu/_files/src/2025-SRC-Presenter-Lineup.pdf
- Floor Broekgaarden: 9AM I will be opening the SRC conference trying to wake up everyone
- Suoi-Nguon Pham : 9:15 @ Marshall College Room
- Alexis Vazquez: 9:45 @ Muir College Room
- Feranmi Falodun will be @ 12:45 Muir College Room
- Laya Binu at 2:15PM @ Muir College Room
- Manasvini Komandur at 3:30 @ Muir College Room
We hope to see you there!
Aug 5, 2025
Congrats to Esther Park for getting selected to the Caltech FUTURE program. This program is an all-expenses-paid event supported by Caltech, the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, and the Heising-Simons Foundation where participants have an opportunity to receive personalized guidance on how to navigate the graduate school application process through mini-workshops, attend panel discussions on topical research areas as well as on graduate student life, and engage in intimate big science discussions with Caltech faculty.
Aug 3, 2025
Athira Menon was visiting from Columbia University to talk about stellar mergers. Here is a picture with her and some of the members of the GW Paleontology group.
From left to right: Shasha Arani (top photo)/Alex Migala (bottom photo), Athira Menon, me, Suoi-Nguon (“Soo-non”) Pham (StartAstro), Manasvini Komandur (STARS), Esther Park, Saina Kadni (STARS), and Feranmi Falodun (CalBridge). Keep an eye out for these talented researchers! 🤩 😎
July 18
Our group members attended the Fullerton Workshop on Gravitational Waves and Nuclear Physics. We had over 10 different members from our group attending! Here’s a group picture from one of the workshop days.
July 15, 2025
Floor Broekgaarden was a panelist at the UC San Diego Workshop for undergraduate students doing summer internships on campus (STARS program). On the right is a picture from the event!
July 1, 2025
Congrats to Marko Ristić for getting an honorable mention for the IAU thesis prize https://www.iau.org/Iau/News/Ann2025/ann25017.aspx 
and for officially becoming a visiting postdoc at UCSD as of last week & getting the UCSD Schmidt AI Postdoc Fellowship 
This will be a great year ahead for Marko!
Jule 30, 2025
Congrats to collaborator Lucas de Sá on passing the PhD defense last week, and now being Dr de Sa!! We are looking so much forward to what is ahead for you in Heidelberg!!!
June 27, 2025
Congrats to Sasha Levina on obtaining her Master of Arts from JHU and on getting the official offer letter from UCSD where she will be moving to next month!
- Laya Binu for getting the UCSD URS Fellowship,
- Feranmi Falodun for receiving the CalBridge Fellowship
- Alexis Vazquez for receiving the CalBridge Summer Fellowship
- Manasvini Komandur for receiving the STARS fellowship
- Suoi-Nguon Pham for receiving the STARTastro Fellowship
- Hanan Sayes on receiving the incredible KAUST Fellowship!
As well as Danielle Smart for receiving a full fellowship to join the CodeAstro workshop in Chicago later this summer (really awesome!) after an amazing CenCa bridge program performance with Ana Lam as advisor
Also congrats to Angel Hernandez on getting accepted into the MSc Program in Chicago for Astronomy & Astrophysics!
June 26, 2025
Congrats to Ana Lam for obtaining her MSc degree as part of the amazing second cohort of the CUNY MSc Program in New York
May 2, 2025
UC San Diego Stellar Beginnings took place, where Floor gave one of the talks on Black Hole Paleontology to celebrate the beginning of our new Astronomy department. You can watch the presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJj191cJSPg&t=2482s
Feb, 27
This week the “GWIC-Braccini thesis prize” was announced, recognizing an outstanding Ph.D. thesis in the field of gravitational waves. My thesis was among the 6 finalists for the 2023 calendar year (https://gwic.ligo.org/thesis-prize.html; see 2023 winners)
Jan 27, CUWIP, including Floor as speaker
Jan 16, 2025
Ana Lam presenting and visiting at UCSD
Jan 10, 2025
AAS Meeting Group Dinner!
Jan, 2025
SMASH Hackathon was a success. Congratulations to all the winners & participants of the hackathon!
Jan 2, 2025
With SMASH we are organizing a hackathon for students on the UCSD campus. Join us 11 & 12 January!
See hackathon_flyer for more info.
December 20, 2024
Our NASA HPOSS proposal was succesfull! We will be working on improving the Software Citation Station next year with the help of a funded student. Are you interested in software, software citations, and astronomy? Please get in touch!
October 22, 2024
On Tuesday October 22, 2024, the first “SMASH” (UC San Diego Meetings between Astro/physics, SDSC, & HDSI) meeting took place. This is a new initiative led by A&A’s Floor Broekgaarden between Astrophysics, Physics, and the data science, AI, and supercomputer centers on the UCSD campus. The first meeting was attended by over 50 different scientists and focused on introductions and getting to know each other. SMASH meetings will take place bi-weekly, and rotate between the different departments.
September 2024
Big Update:
I started a new position as Assistant Professor at UC San Diego. I will be looking for students and postdocs to join my group in 2025 – so please spread the word!
July 2024
Tom Wagg & Floor Broekgaarden wrote a paper and made a website/tool to make citing software in academic research easier! Check it out here: https://www.tomwagg.com/software-citation-station/
June 2024
Lots of updates! Ana Lam was selected for the Yale Workshop on developing python course material for lectures and classes in Astronomy.
Sasha Levina was selected to be one of the Lorentz center participants for the workshop on chemical enrichment and gravitational waves, as well as for a PhD summer school and the CodeAstro coding school in Chicago!
Adam Boesky is off for a fun internship at SpaceX,
Floor Broekgaarden got selected for the Rising Stars in Physics 2024 workshop!
May 6 2024
Adam Boesky’s two!! first first-author papers are up on ArXiv (see screenshots below), where he investigates whether the merger rate of binary black holes (and black hole-neutron star and binary neutron stars) deviates from a re-scaled star formation rate!
We submitted the articles to ApJ. Adam will be applying for grad school this fall, so look out for his application!
May 3 2024
I was selected as one of the Early Science with LSST Scialog Fellows. Excited to attend the conference in the fall of 2024 with all the other inspiring scientists! https://t.co/jMEg0ZDnUM
April 19 2024
Honored to have received the Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Doctoral Disstertation Award in Astrophysics at the APS last week!
Announcement: https://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/prizerecipient.cfm?last_nm=Broekgaarden&first_nm=Floor&year=2024
April 8 2024
Adam Boesky presented his work in the APS April meeting this week! With lots of interesting questions from the audience. Stay tuned for his (2) papers coming out soon!
March 26 2024
We are organizing an Astro-AI workshop this summer at the CfA! Please join us this summer for some exciting lectures, talks, a code demo fest, posters, and lots of fun at the CfA!
See for more information: https://astroai2024.eventbrite.com/
June 10, 2023,
My BAAS article was posted online, in which I discuss ten ways that departments, institutes, and conference organizers in Astronomy can improve support resources for astronomers that experience harassment.
Find it here:
BAAS: https://baas.aas.org/pub/2023i020/release/1
Astrobites post: https://astrobites.org/2023/05/25/ten-ways-to-improve-support-resources-for-workplace-incivility-in-astronomy/
June 2, 2023: Podcast about Cosmic Battleship
Check out this month’s Colloquy #podcast: “A Cosmic Game of Battleship” featuring astrophysicist Floor Broekgaarden, PhD ‘23, who discusses the impact of massive stars & her algorithm that is revolutionizing computer simulations of the universe. Listen to the full video at: buff.ly/43imQHr
May 28 2023: GRADUATED!
And received my diploma.
Proud to be the First Dr in my family!
May 15, 2023: I was awarded the Harvard Keto Thesis prize
For the best thesis in theoretical Astrophysics within the Harvard Astronomy department! See announcement below.
April 24, 2023, I am a DR. now!!
Received my Ph.D. after a successful defense. You can watch the defense via the youtube link below.
April 11, 2023, Harvard Horizons talk!
As part of the Harvard Horizons program, I gave a TED-style talk about my research at Harvard. You can listen to via the link below. And read more about it at https://gsas.harvard.edu/event/2023-harvard-horizons-symposium
Presenting a TEDx-style talk for the Harvard Horizons Program
April 1, 2023
I wrote a fun April’s Fools paper about “counting Gravitational Wave detections”. You can find it at https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.17628 and see the page GWfun for the visualizations!
18 March 2023
Honoured that I joined the Women in Physics (WiP) brunch at JHU today. What an inspiring group of physicists! In my presentation, I started with this slide that has one of my favorite quotes. 
9 March 2023
Harvard published an interview about my PhD research as part of the Harvard Horizons 2023 program. You can read all about it here: https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/stories/streamlining-search-black-holes
29 Feb 2023
I am working these weeks on many animations of gravitational-wave sources for the Harvard Horizons Program. Below is a very early draft of an animation that could go with a sentence like “”all around us pairs of Black Holes collide, releasing a burst of gravitational waves that can travel million of years to reach us on earth “
24 Feb 2023
Presented our CfA white paper during the Science retreat of our department. We emphasized that the new frontier of gravitational-wave astrophysics is very exciting and will enable many discoveries in the coming decades, and that CfA could have a leading role in this endeavor by strengthening collaborations with the gravitational-wave experts at MIT and the Black Hole Initiative.
Feb 20 2023
Adam Boesky has been awarded HRCP funding for this spring semester!! This means more awesome science and figuring out the redshift evolution of BBH, BHNS, and BNS mergers.
12 Feb 2023
— I am moving to New York this summer! — I am excited to announce that I accepted a Postdoc Fellowship as Junior Fellow in the Simons Society of Fellows with Columbia University as host, as well as a Postdoc Fellowship as Simons Foundation Research Fellow at the CCA. This means that I can be a postdoc fellow for 5 years in New York and on a daily basis will share my time between CCA/Flatiron Institute and Columbia University, where I will work in the THEA group and with Brian Metzger as host. Looking forward to this! Please pass by at any point, I am always happy to host!
30 Jan 2023
We restarted the CfA Machine Learning Journal Club this semester with a wonderful group of organizers: Nayantara Mudur, Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, Cecilia Garaffo, and Floor Broekgaarden. Excitingly it will be part of the CAMeL initiative of CfA to have a CfA-wide effort to pursue Machine Learning Projects across the Astrophysics divisions of CfA. 🙂
24 Jan 2023
Presenting the Monash Physics & Astronomy Colloquium at my last week in Melbourne/Australia
7 Jan 2023
Miranda Harkess (UMass Boston and CfA LIP summer student) is presenting her poster on young stellar objects this week at AAS241 in Seattle! Check out her poster at this link.
20 December 2022
I am selected as a Harvard Horizons 2023 scholar!
“The Harvard Horizons Scholars are selected by the Harvard Horizons Faculty Fellows as representatives of the extraordinary researchers who make up Harvard’s PhD community. These nine students form the tenth class of the Society of Horizons Scholars, a fellowship cohort that offers opportunities for long-lasting community, mentorship, and professional and academic growth. The scholars will receive in-depth mentoring on the art of effective presentation, preparing them for a campus-wide symposium on April 11, 2023, at 4:30 p.m. in Sanders Theatre.”
12 Dec 2022
Join the Astronomy Phd School in Scientific Communication in Astronomy organized by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), I am joining as one of the invited guest lecturers. More info & registration are now open at this link.
5 Dec 2022
Presenting my work at the annual gravitational-wave meeting “GWPAW” in Melbourne, Australia
10 Nov 2022
Feeling incredibly proud to close this semester’s Early-career Astronomers & Their Supporters Workshop series at the Center for Astrophysics with a workshop on workplace civility resources & support. This workshop was in collaboration with CfA director Lisa Kewley, Dr Christina Richey and many local ombudspersons, title IX, and other workplace civility resources. I feel very grateful for all the support, including over 300+ attendees. The links and video can be found on my website tab for the CfA-ECA workshop.
22 July 2022
I’m THRILLED to share that I’ve been awarded the NASA FINESST Future Investigator grant to further explore how we can learn about massive stars from the population of gravitational waves. The NASA FINESST award provides 100k$ research funding to pursue independent research during my PhD.
