Our group at Johns Hopkins University is part of the STRONG Marie Skłodowska-Curie Staff Exchange Action dedicated to investigating gravity in its most extreme regimes, where compact objects, high-energy phenomena, and fundamental fields interact.
The direct detection of gravitational waves has transformed our ability to observe the Universe, turning black holes and neutron stars into precision laboratories for testing gravity under conditions that cannot be reproduced on Earth. As future ground- and space-based detectors come online, the scientific challenge is no longer detection alone, but the accurate interpretation of increasingly complex signals.
The STRONG Staff Exchange Action addresses this challenge by advancing theoretical and computational tools for modeling compact objects and their gravitational-wave emission, with the aim of probing strong-field gravity, characterizing astrophysical environments, and exploring possible extensions of general relativity and of the Standard Model of particle physics and cosmology.
The STRONG website is now live. The network is coordinated by Andrea Maselli (Gran Sasso Science Institute). Besides our group at Johns Hopkins, it includes Laura Sberna (University of Nottingham), Vitor Cardoso (University of Copenhagen), Paolo Pani (Sapienza University of Rome), Leonardo Gualtieri (University of Pisa), Laura Bernard (Laboratoire d’étude de l’Univers et des phénomènes eXtrêmes), Luis Lehner (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics), Helvi Witek (University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign), Shinji Mukohyama (Kyoto University), Parameswaran Ajith (ICTS-TIFR, Bangalore), and Sumanta Chakraborty (IACS, Kolkata).