Speaker
Description
Gravitational waves provide a unique way to study some of the most extreme phenomena in the Universe, offering access to astrophysical processes that may be hidden or only partially visible through traditional electromagnetic observations. Their observation has already transformed modern astrophysics, and future progress will depend not only on detector sensitivity, but also on our ability to extract information from weak, uncertain, or poorly modeled signals. In this presentation, I will first outline why gravitational-wave research is important today, from a physical, astrophysical, and methodological point of view. I will then present my recent PhD work, which focuses on the study of subthreshold gravitational-wave candidates and on the development of tools to account for detector response, sky localization, and statistical biases in population analyses. These activities include the use of statistical tests applied to sky distributions of candidate events and broader studies of network performance for present and future interferometers. I will also briefly discuss related work on PycWB, a modern and modular framework for unmodeled gravitational-wave searches.