Question: Do you work on anything else other than black holes at your job?

Alexander Burke answered on 5 Mar 2018:

Of course! I’m also very involved with teaching at my university. I teach Statistics, Engineering Mathematics and General Relativity to students. I also work on gravitational wave data analysis using the LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antennae) spacecraft. Gravitational waves are very small, their amplitudes are roughly 10,000 times smaller than the width of a proton. This means that they’re incredibly difficult to detect! The spacecraft mentioned above will be able to detect gravitational waves from very weak (low frequency) things in the universe… perhaps even gravitational waves from the big bang! One of my projects is: Given the data spat out by LISA, can I come up with clever ways to filter out the ‘messy noise’ of the detector and recover the gravitational wave signal we want. It may sound like I only work on black holes but this is certainly not the case! I look at many other things as well, I just find black holes one of the more interesting parts.