Speaker profile

Summary

Christopher studies Gravitational-wave astronomy, the secrets of black holes and specialises in Experimental & Theoretical Physics.

Full biography

As an undergraduate, Christopher Berry read Natural Science at the University of Cambridge, specialising in Experimental & Theoretical Physics. He continued at Cambridge, at the Institute of Astronomy, for his PhD, where his supervisor was Jonathan Gair. He worked on a range of topics connected to gravity with a particular interest in what we could learn from the space-based gravitational-wave observatory LISA.

Following his PhD, in 2013 Christopher moved to the University of Birmingham as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Here, he joined the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and developed expertise in gravitational-wave parameter estimation. He worked on LIGO’s first detections in 2015 and led the analysis of GW170104. Christopher remains an active member of LIGO, he recently led production of the final results from the third observing run of the international ground-based gravitational-wave detector network, and he is currently working on analysing discoveries for the fourth observing run.

In 2018, Christopher became the CIERA Board of Visitors Research Professor at Northwestern University, where he developed his research into the astrophysical origins of black holes and neutron stars. Christopher joined the University of Glasgow as a Lecturer in the School of Physics & Astronomy in 2020, and is a member of the institute for Gravitational Research. He has won the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics' Young Scientist Prize in General Relativity & Gravitation for "key contributions to gravitational-wave discoveries, mentoring and leadership to support the research community, and effective public outreach" and the Royal Astronomical Society's Fowler Award for Early Achievement in Astronomy for "outstanding work on the analysis and publication of the results from the detections of gravitational waves".

Affiliations