Newswise — Perimeter Institute is pleased to announce the appointment of Luis Lehner as an Associate Faculty member. Dr. Lehner officially takes up his position at PI in August 2009, with a concurrent appointment at the University of Guelph.
In making the announcement, PI Director, Dr. Neil Turok, said:"We are delighted to be welcoming Dr Lehner onto the Faculty at the Perimeter Institute. Dr Lehner is a pioneer of modern efforts to extract definite predictions for the behavior of black holes and other strongly gravitating systems from Einstein's beautiful but notoriously difficult equations. Observational tests, using gravitational wave astronomy, are now just around the corner. With Dr Lehner's recruitment, Southern Ontario is set to become a world leading centre in this very exciting field."
Dr. Lehner describes his current research interests as follows:"I've always found gravity and its effects fascinating. This lead me into General Relativity; Einstein's beautiful theory which holds the clue (at least in the classical regime) to fully understand gravity. The equations governing the gravitational system are so involved that to decipher their message in the most interesting cases (strongly gravitating-highly dynamical regimes) one must resort to numerical simulations. I have been working in the field of Numerical Relativity (the sub-branch of General Relativity studying how to obtain these numerical implementations) since 1994. Obtaining a numerical simulation of any physical system, but in particular one described by Einstein equations is far from being a straightforward task. A large number of issues must be contemplated in this enterprise and my interests cover all of them. From analytical issues to writing implementations to be run on supercomputers" . Luis Lehner studied physics at FaMAF (National University of Cordoba) and came to the USA in 1994 to the University of Pittsburgh. He received his PhD in 1998 under the direction of Jeffrey Winicour. He held postdoctoral fellow positions at the University of Texas at Austin (1998-2000) and the University of British Columbia (2000-2002). He is currently an Associate Professor of Physics at Louisiana State University.
Dr. Lehner received the Honor Prize in 1993 from the National University of Cordoba, Argentina; held a Mellon pre-doctoral fellowship in 1997; the CGS/UMI outstanding dissertation award and the Nicholas Metropolis award in 1999; was a PIMS fellow from 2000 to 2002 and a CITA National Fellow in 2001-2002. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (2003-2005) and is currently a CIAR associate member, a fellow of the Institute of Physics, editorial Board member of Classical and Quantum Gravity and a member of the NSF-Cyber Infrastructure User Advisory Committee.
About Perimeter InstitutePerimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is a leading international research centre whose goal is to catalyze breakthroughs in our understanding of the physical world. PI's award-winning facility provides a multi-disciplinary environment to foster research in areas of Cosmology, Particle Physics, Quantum Foundations, Quantum Gravity, Quantum Information , Superstring Theory and related fields. The Institute, located in Waterloo, Ontario, also provides a wide array of educational outreach activities for students, teachers and members of the general public across the country and beyond in order to share the joy of scientific research, discovery and innovation. Additional information can be found online at http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca.
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