Email: V.Sagun@soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 23 8059 8547
Violetta Sagun is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Mathematical Sciences. Her research focuses on neutron star properties, multi-messenger astrophysics, and dark matter.
She is a member of the European Consortium for Astroparticle Theory (EuCAPT), Einstein Telescope Collaboration, LISA Collaboration, and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope collaboration.
More information about Violetta's research projects and publications can be found on her personal page.
Violetta’s research interests span from compact stars and multi-messenger astrophysics to strongly interacting matter properties and critical phenomena. She focuses on studying the effects of dark matter on neutron stars and their merger dynamics. By performing numerical relativity simulations of the coalescence of dark matter-admixed compact stars together with colleagues she is searching for the signals of the presence of dark matter in compact stars.
Another area of her research involves exploring the properties of strongly interacting matter across a broad range of temperatures and baryon densities, encompassing heavy-ion collisions and neutron stars. Using astrophysical data, Violetta probes the existence of deconfined quark matter in the cores of neutron stars.
Violetta received her PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics from the Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyiv in 2015. She then spent a year as a junior scientific researcher in the Department of High Energy Density Physics at the same institute. In December 2016, she joined the Center for Astrophysics and Gravitation (CENTRA) at Instituto Superior Técnico as a postdoctoral researcher, where she began exploring a new research area focused on neutron stars.
In December 2017, Violetta returned to the Bogolyubov Institute for a two-month period before starting a second postdoctoral position at CENTRA in February 2018.
From 2019 to 2024, she worked as an assistant researcher at the Centre for Physics of the University of Coimbra (CFisUC). In January 2025, she began a new position as a Senior Researcher at the University of Southampton.