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Aditya Vijaykumar will join CITA as a CITA Fellow this Fall. He will soon receive his PhD from the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bengaluru, India. During the final year of his graduate studies, Aditya was also a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow at The University of Chicago in the US. Aditya’s research interests span theory, astrophysics and data analysis aspects of gravitational-wave sources. His past work has concentrated on testing aspects of Einstein’s general relativity with gravitational wave detections, and also developing novel ways of investigating astrophysical formation channels with these detections. At CITA, Aditya will continue his research on these topics and also explore synergies of gravitational-wave observations with transient sources and cosmology.

Yanlong Shi is joining CITA as a postdoc. He will receive his PhD from Caltech in the summer of 2023. He is interested in astrophysical massive black holes and numerical simulations, with which he studies BHs’ formation, accretion, and feedback in realistic environments. Moreover, he is interested in large-scale structures of the Universe.

Gibwa Musoke is joining CITA as a CITA Postdoctoral Fellow. She received her PhD from the University of Bristol in the UK. Gibwa works on general relativistic magneto-hydrodynamic simulations of accreting black holes and relativistic jet launching, with a focus on very thin accretion flows. She explores the long-term evolution and dynamics of accretion flows, jet and wind outflows, and whether the simulations can reproduce the highly-variable X-ray emission signatures observed in black hole X-ray binaries. Gibwa also works on understanding how jets interact with, and influence the evolution of, their large-scale environments by conducting magneto-hydrodynamic simulations. She is a member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and next generation EHT collaborations.

Labani Mallick is joining CITA as a National Fellow at the University of Manitoba with Prof. Samar Safi-Harb. She received her Ph.D. from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), India, and is currently working as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech.

Labani’s research focuses on intermediate-mass and supermassive black holes that accrete matter from their host galaxies. She primarily studies the X-rays emitted from the innermost region of the accretion flow. Labani develops and employs novel spectral-timing models and methods to black hole observations to extend our census of known parameters into the domains key to the black hole-galaxy co-evolution.

As a CITA National Fellow, she will map the relativistic winds around supermassive black holes and conduct systematic investigations of wind populations employing three new strategies that will transform our understanding of accretion/ejection processes and establish the role of outflowing winds in black hole-galaxy co-evolution.