Éanna Flanagan

Professor of Physics and Astronomy

606 Space Sciences, CRSR, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853

Phone: (607) 255-6534 Fax: (607) 255-6918 Email: eef3@cornell.edu

Biographical Sketch

Éanna Flanagan recieved his BSc and MSc in mathematical science from University College Dublin in 1987 and 1988, and his PhD in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1993, where he studied with Kip Thorne. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech for one year, and from 1994 to 1996 was an Enrico Fermi fellow at the University of Chicago. In August 1996 Flanagan joined the faculty of the Astronomy and Physics departments at Cornell University. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Career award in 1997. He was elected to a three year term on the executive committee of the American Physical Society Topical Group in Gravitation in 1999 and again in 2004. In 2002 he was awarded a Radcliffe fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where he spent the 2002/03 academic year. In 2004 he was awarded the Basilis C. Xanthopoulos International Award for Research in Gravitational Physics. In 2007 he was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2013 he became a fellow of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation.

Research Interests

My research interests include general relativity, relativistic astrophysics, cosmology, and quantum fields in curved spacetime. Currently, one focus of my group's research is understanding various sources of gravitational radiation, and developing analytical approximation methods to calculate the gravitational waves they emit. Gravitational waves will hopefully be detected in the next few years by LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory). Another focus is exploring string-theory inspired models of the Universe with extra-dimensions and branes, and their implications for cosmology and astrophysics.

Papers

Current Graduate Students and Postdocs

Joloyn Bloomfield (postdoc)
Ulisses Diego Machado (postdoc)
David Nichols (postdoc)
Leo Stein (Einstein fellow)
Justin Vines (Physics Graduate Student)
Sina Bahrami (Physics Graduate Student)

Former Group Members

Wolfgang Tichy, Associate Professor, Florida Atlantic University
Steve Drasco, Assistant Professor of Physics, Grinnell College.
Etienne Racine, postdoc at the University of Maryland.
Marc Favata, Assistant Professor of Physics, Montclair University.
Ali Vanderveld, Fellow at Kvali Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago.
Tanja Hinderer, Research Associate, Joint Space-Science Institute, University of Maryland.
Andy Lundgren, postdoc at Syracuse University.

Lecture Notes and Talks

Saturation of neutron star r-mode instability and gravitational wave signal, Caltech, November 22, 2002.
Gravitational waves as probes of cosmology, Carnegie Centennial Symposium, November 2002.
Quantum Inequalities in Curved Spacetime, Theoretical Physics Seminary, Brown University, Feburary 26 2003.
Gravitational Interactions of Compact Binaries, High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Physical Society meeting, Mt. Tremblant, Canada, 26 March 2003.
Gravitational Waves, presentation to the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics, April 29 2003.
The accelerating Universe and gravitation theories obtained from the Palatini variational principle, University of Maryland, 16 April 2004.
Angular Momentum carried by gravitational waves, APS April meeting, 2 May 2004.
Implementing Mino's prescription for computing gravitational waveforms, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, 15 October 2004.
Gravitational waves from compact objects inspiralling into massive black holes , American Physical Society Meeting, Tampa, Florida, 16 April 2005.
Post-1-Newtonian equations of motion for systems of arbitrarily structured bodies , Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, 30 June 2005.
Theoretical explanations for cosmic acceleration, Physics colloquium, University of Guelph, 17 October 2006.
Theoretical explanations for the accelerating Universe, Invited Plenary Talk, JGRG16, Niigata, Japan, 27 Novemberer 2006.
Inspirals of point particles into black holes via two-timescale expansions, Invited Talk, University of Maryland, 9 Novemberer 2007.
Two timescale expansions of the Einstein equations, 11th Eastern Gravity Meeting, Penn State, 13 May 2008.
Cosmological Inhomogeneities and Dark Energy, KICP colloquium, University of Chicago, 5 November 2008.
Detection templates for extreme mass ratio inspirals: is the radiative aproximation sufficient?, American Physical Society Meeting, Denver, 3 May 2009.
Modified Gravity: Fairy Godmother or Untamed Beast, Conference on "Tests of Gravity and Gravitational Physics", Case Western Reserve University, 20 May 2009.
Inspirals of point particles into black holes and two-timescale expansions, Invited talk, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge University, 30 April 2010.
Astrometric properties of a stochastic gravitational wave background, Invited talk, Conference on "Cosmology since Einstein", Institute for Advanced Study of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 31 May 2011.
Effective Field Theory and Modified Gravity, Invited talk, Conference on "Cosmological Tests of Gravity", Oxford University, 13 March 2013.