This week, two researchers from the GRAVITY group at IAC3 have had the honour to give two of the eight invited talks at the 13th Iberian Gravitational Waves Meeting hosted by the University of Salamanca, demonstrating the leadership of the group in international gravitational-waves collaborations and its recognition by the national community.
Dr. Anna Heffernan gave the opening talk of the meeting on Monday the 24th of June, covering the topic of “Waveforms for LISA”: the challenges in precisely modelling gravitational wave signals for the upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna led by the European Space Agency and where the GRAVITY group is one of the biggest member groups. An expert in gravitational self-force calculations and waveform modelling, Dr. Heffernan is co-chair of the LISA Consortium’s “Waveforms Work Package” and member of its “Consortium Constituent Council”.
Later in the day, Dr. David Keitel gave another invited talk on “LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA results so far and status of the O4 run”, as representative of the international LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration in which the GRAVITY group, led by principal investigador Prof. Alicia Sintes, has long made key contributions. The current fourth observing run (O4) of the international detector network has been ongoing since May 2023 and has recently been extended to June 2025. Dr. Keitel is an expert on gravitational-waves data analysis, co-chair of the LVK’s continuous-waves working group and member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration’s council, management team and program committee.
The Iberian Gravitational Waves Meeting is an international conference organised yearly since 2011 by different members of the Red Española de Ondas Gravitacionales (REDONGRA). It brings together researchers with interest in the development of Gravitational Waves Astronomy, including researchers from related areas of Astrophysics, multi-messenger Astronomy, Cosmology, Fundamental Physics, Instrumentation and Data analysis and, importantly, to foster collaboration among them. Leading researchers in the field, both from the Iberian countries and internationally, are invited as speakers, and participation is open to the whole gravitational waves community.
See https://iberiangw2024.usal.es/ for the conference website.