Paul J. Groot - Homepage

Astrophysics Nijmegen

Curriculum Vitae

Publications

UVEX Survey

OmegaWhite Survey

The MeerLICHT Telescope

BlackGEM Array

Paul Groot is professor of astronomy at, and co-founder of, the Department of Astrophysics of Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.  His areas of expertise are ultracompact binaries, transient sources and gravitational wave emitters.  The research is focused on discovering and characterizing these elusive systems and using them as a probe to understand fundamental physics. For this he uses wide field surveys, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey , and the European Galactic Plane Surveys, of which he is one of the leading researchers. The European Galactic Plane Surveys consist of the IPHAS survey of the Galactic plane in H-alpha, the blue UVEX survey  (both on La Palma using the INT Wide Field Camera and the Southern VPHAS+ survey, using the ESO VST+Omegacam.

He also has an active interest in short transients in the Universe: sources that appear and disappear within a few days. Triggered by his discovery of optical afterglows to Gamma-ray bursts, he is intrigued by the question what else varies in the night at these time scales. To answer this question he is a member of the Palomar Transient Factory collaboration, of the Virgo collaboration for gravitational wave detection and he is the PI on both the MeerLICHT telescope as well as the BlackGEM array for the detection of optical counterparts to gravitational wave sources.

To enable his science Paul Groot has a keen interest in instrument development. He was Dutch Co-PI and Project Scientist on the hugely successful X-Shooter spectrograph on the VLT telescope of the European Southern Observatory, and he is the PI on both the MeerLICHT as well as the BlackGEM array. He is also keenly interested in low-cost, low-weight very large aperture optical spectrographic telescopes.

Paul Groot received his PhD 'cum laude' at the University of Amsterdam in 1999, was a CfA Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, USA, and came to Nijmegen in 2002 to start the new department of Astrophysics, together with Jan Kuijpers. In 2009 he was elected as a member of the Young Academy (Jonge Akademie) of the Royal Netherlands Academy for Sciences (KNAW). He was chair of the Department of Astrophysics from 2006 - 2016 and chair of the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) from 2012 - 2016  

He is the discoverer of optical counterparts to gamma-ray bursts and is part of the LIGO-Virgo team that discovered the first gravitational waves through laser-interferometry.