Drs. Joe Lyman and Laura Nuttall have each been awarded a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF), with GOTO playing a major role in the respective projects.
The prestigious FLF scheme is designed to attract and retain the most talented researchers in the UK and come with generous support for up to 7 years, which will allow the awardees to build their own team of researchers.
Dr. Lyman’s project, New frontiers in transient astrophysics: gravitational-wave multi-messenger events and exotic stellar explosions will continue his work on the transient Universe at the University of Warwick. As part of this, a world-leading software stack for GOTO will be created, enabling the fellowship’s team to fully exploit GOTO’s capabilities as a discovery machine for supernovae and kilonovae. Resources in the fellowship have also been allocated to establish a rapid follow-up network on the island of La Palma, in order to quickly move from discovery to characterisation of new transients, opening new windows on the study of their nature.
Dr. Nuttall’s project, Multi-band, Multi-messenger Astrophysics with LIGO, LISA and GOTO, will continue her leading work in the LIGO/Virgo collaboration from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth. She will investigate is how the changing nature of LIGO sensitivity affects the ability to accurately measure the properties of gravitational- wave signals and develop techniques to overcome periods of poor LIGO sensitivity. Dr Nuttall’s fellowship will also look in to characterising LISA—the next generation of gravitational-wave detector. She will be using GOTO in the hunt for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational-wave events discovered by these detectors.
Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash
