Kaitlyn Szekerczes, a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at The Pennsylvania State University, was awarded a prestigious Fulbright-IKY Ph.D Fellowship to conduct research at the Institute of Astrophysics, Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (IA-FORTH). Kaitlyn will spend six months at IA-FORTH (from 15 November 2026 through 15 May 2027) working with Dr. Maria Charisi and her ERC-funded group MMMonsters. This will be Kaitlyn’s second international research experience, as she was also a Fullbright fellow in Germany during her undergraduate studies.
Kaitlyn’s project will focus on multi-messenger astrophysics, a new type of astronomy that combines diverse information from gravitational waves and light. In particular, we expect that the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a European space mission which will launch in the mid-2030s, will detect gravitational waves from massive black hole binaries. Following such a detection, we will follow-up with traditional telescopes to find the electromagnetic counterpart (light) of the binary, which may show as a periodic signal in time-domain data. Kaitlyn will explore how often we can confuse this with signals from binary stars, which also produce periodic signals with similar periods. For this, she will use data from the Zwicky Transient Facility and the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which is about to begin operations. Kaitilyn’s project aims to inform and improve the efficiency of future multi-messenger searches for the massive black hole binaries.
