We congratulate UVa Assistant Professor of Physics David Nichols on his NSF CAREER award for work "Investigating Matter and Spacetime Using Gravitational Waves".

The award supports research related to gravitational waves, a prediction of general relativity, which are produced during the mergers of strongly gravitating objects, such as black holes and neutron stars. Nichols and his research group will develop data-analysis methods and perform new theoretical calculations to search for as-of-yet undiscovered predictions of general relativity and identify new relativistic phenomena that could be observed through gravitational-wave measurements by the detectors LIGO and NANOGrav. He will also create new visualizations of the warped space around colliding black holes and accompanying recorded video explanations of the visualizations, which will help students to learn about the LIGO discoveries and teachers to convey these results to their students.

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2439893