With the Nobel Prize-winning detections of gravitational waves by the LIGO collaboration in 2015, the need for high accuracy predictions of waveforms from compact object binaries for the full interpretation of the new data is of paramount importance. However, producing usable waveforms amounts to solving Einstein’s field equations governing gravitational dynamics for the orbiting binary system, a daunting task. Doing this numerically is costly and inefficient, and so developing analytical techniques is essential.

My research employs an effective field theory framework known as non-relativistic general relativity. Importing tools developed in quantum field theory, we efficiently calculate the dynamics during the early stages of the merger process known as the inspiral phase. My work in this area includes modern scattering amplitude methods and non-relativistic general relativity with spin, and extend to other gravitational effects, such as particle physics in the strong gravity regime in early universe cosmology.