Abhirup Ghosh, a former graduate student from ICTS, has received an 'honorable mention' for the 2018 Braccini Thesis Prize by the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC).
Abhirup’s thesis titled ‘Testing general relativity using observations of gravitational waves from the inspiral, merger and ringdown of binary black holes’, under the supervision of Prof. Parameswaran Ajith, described the formulation of one of the first strong-field tests of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, and its demonstration on actual gravitational wave observations of binary black hole mergers by Advanced LIGO-Virgo.
The Stefano Braccini Thesis Prize
The Stefano Braccini Thesis Prize was established in 2011 by an informal group of scientists to honor the memory of the gravitational wave physicist. The award was later adopted by GWIC in 2013. Prof. Stefano Braccini (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Italy) worked with the Virgo project and contributed to the super attenuator design, to the integration and commissioning of Virgo and to its data analysis efforts.