About
Adam is a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the School of Mathematical Sciences, where he leads a team of students and researchers working on modelling sources of gravitational waves. He is also the School’s Director of Outreach.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- General Relativity
- Sources of gravitational waves
- Black holes
- Relativistic dynamics and the gravitational two-body problem
- Perturbation theory and asymptotic methods
Current research
Adam’s research focuses on modelling compact binaries — tightly bound two-body systems made up of black holes or neutron stars. In these systems, the two bodies distort spacetime as they orbit one another, creating ripples in the geometry of spacetime. These ripples, called gravitational waves, carry precise information about the systems that created them, but detecting the waves and extracting the information from them requires highly accurate theoretical models. Adam specializes in developing such models for binaries in which one object is much smaller than the other. The most extreme examples of these are extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs), which occur in galactic cores when a star or stellar-mass black hole is captured by a massive black hole tens of thousands to millions of times larger.
As a core part of his research activities, Adam is a member of the LISA Consortium, the international collaboration devoted to the LISA space mission. In the Consortium he coordinates the effort to formulate high-accuracy models of EMRIs.
Research projects
Active projects
Completed projects
Publications
Teaching
Adam teaches Advanced General Relativity each winter.
Biography
Adam joined Southampton in 2011 as an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow. Before that, he held a one-year postdoctoral position in condensed matter physics at the University of Guelph and McMaster University, where he researched graphene and high-temperature superconductors. He did his PhD in gravitational physics at the University of Guelph under the supervision of Eric Poisson.