Black Holes in the Era of Gravitational-Wave Astronomy

Manuel Arca Sedda is Assistant Professor at the Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy. His research focuses mainly on modelling black hole formation in stellar systems and using models to interpret gravitational wave observations. Manuel obtained his PhD in Astronomy in 2014 from the University of Rome Sapienza. In 2017 he joined the Collaborative Research Center SFB881 "The Milky Way System? at the University of Heidelberg. In 2018 he was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship for the research project "Black holes at all the scales?, focused on the study of the evolution of black holes from stellar to galactic scales. In 2021 Manuel was awarded a prestigious Marie Curie Sklowdoska Fellowship from the European Union to pursue at the University of Padova his research project "GRACE-BH: Gravitational Radiation from Crowded Environments". Elisa Bortolas is Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Milano-Bicocca, working in the group led by Alberto Sesana. Her research focuses on the dynamics of supermassive binaries in preparation for the forthcoming low-frequency gravitational wave detectors. Elisa obtained her PhD in Astronomy from the University of Padova, in 2019, in collaboration with the University of Surrey, working on the dynamics of galactic nuclei. Her PhD thesis was awarded the Gratton prize for the best Italian thesis in Astronomy. She then moved to the University of Zurich, working as a postdoc in the group led by L. Mayer, on the dynamics of massive black hole binaries in the early Universe. Mario Spera is Assistant Professor at the International School for Advanced Studies - SISSA, where he works as a theoretical and computational astrophysicist. The main goal of his research is to provide an astrophysical interpretation to present and forthcoming gravitational-wave detections. Mario obtained his PhD in Astronomy in 2014 from University of Rome - Sapienza. From 2014 to 2017 he was a postdoc at the Astronomical Observatory of Padova, funded by an excellence FIRB 2012 grant (PI Prof. Michela Mapelli). In 2017, he was awarded an independent postdoctoral fellowship from University of Milano-Bicocca. In the same year, he moved to the University of Innsbruck as a postdoctoral fellow. In 2018, Mario joined the LIGO-Virgo international collaboration and he was awarded the prestigious Marie Sklowdoska Curie Individual Global Fellowship. In 2020, he was hired as Assistant Professor in SISSA, after spending two years as Marie Curie Fellow at Northwestern University in Chicago, USA.