Projects & Funding

GLOW (Gravitational Lensing of Waves)

European Research Council, Consolidator Grant · 2026–2031 · Principal Investigator
Grant agreement 101230608 · 60 months

Gravitational waves and fast radio bursts are coherent: their phase survives the journey, so a lens does not merely magnify them but distorts their wavefront. GLOW builds the theory, methods and software to exploit that. It will search for lensed events in LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA data, probe dark-matter objects and cold-dark-matter halos with LISA, use fast radio bursts to reach planet-scale lenses, and deliver a new class of tests of general relativity and dark energy through lensed propagation. All software and data products will be public.

• WP1 (Wave-optics phenomena): microlensing and plasma-lensing theory
• WP2 (Discovering lensed GWs): microlensed waveforms, accelerated inference, populations
• WP3 (Fundamental physics): dark matter, GW propagation and dark energy

With Einstein on Crooked Paths (Mit Einstein auf krummen Wegen)

Max Planck Society Annual Project (supporting members) · 2024– · Principal Investigator

A philanthropically funded program developing new methods to identify lensed gravitational waves and to use them to probe the small-scale structure of dark matter. It set the methodological foundations that led to the GLoW code and its first applications. The project also carries an explicit outreach commitment: explaining lensed gravitational waves to a non-specialist public.

Ramón y Cajal program

Spanish Research Agency and CSIC · 2026– · Fellow / Principal Investigator

Three linked components of a single faculty recruitment program: the Ramón y Cajal fellowship, the accompanying Atracción de Talento award from the same national agency, and the CSIC RyC-MaX supplement. Together they support work on the gravitational lensing of electromagnetic sources: static ones such as galaxy–galaxy lensing, and variable ones such as quasi-periodic lensed starlight from supermassive black-hole binaries and lensed transients such as type Ia supernovae. Light and gravitational waves are lensed in different regimes, so this line probes black holes, dark matter and cosmic expansion by a route complementary to the wave-optics work.

GWSky (Making Sense of the Gravitational-Wave Sky)

European Research Council, Synergy Grant · ongoing · Senior collaborator

A multi-PI program on the interpretation of the gravitational-wave sky. I contribute the lensing side. A lensed event is not a new kind of source but a distorted one, which puts wave-optics signatures squarely at the interface between waveform modeling and data analysis: the distortion has to enter the templates and the inference machinery before lensing can be searched for at catalog scale. The same work cuts the other way, since unmodeled lensing is a systematic: a diffracted signal can otherwise be read as exotic source physics or as a biased set of parameters.