Dr. Gabriele Bozzola Receives Prestigious Award for his Steward Observatory PhD Thesis

Congratulations to Dr. Gabriele Bozzola for receiving the American Physical Society's 2024 Nicholas Metropolis Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational Physics. 

Bozzola completed his PhD in computational astrophysics at Steward Observatory. He performed groundbreaking work in dynamical spacetime simulations that are relevant to the nascent field of gravitational wave astronomy and multi-messenger astronomy with gravitational waves. During his PhD, he tackled a broad range of problems in relativistic astrophysics where strong-field gravity plays a significant role. He worked on the first simulations of accreting binary black holes that undergo spin-orbit precession, an elegant explanation of problems encountered in backwards-in-time ray tracing around black holes (which are performed for the Event Horizon Telescope). He also pioneered simulations of binary black holes endowed with U(1) charge, and opened a new area of research in binary black holes  and fundamental physics.

The latter work resulted in the first ever constraints on the U(1) charge of black holes and certain classes of modified gravity by using gravitational wave observations, as well as masterful explorations of several fundamental physics questions such as whether charged binary black holes can exceed the Dyson luminosity limit or form naked singularities.

“Gabriele is a strong proponent of open-source tools for the community, and he made all his codes public,” says his PhD advisor, Steward Observatory Associate Professor of Astronomy Vasileios Paschalidis. “It is no surprise that the American Physical Society acknowledged the impact of Gabriele's work with the prestigious Nicholas Metropolis Award for outstanding PhD thesis in computational physics.”