Paul J. Groot - Homepage |
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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. Bio Timeline:1995 MSc Astrophysics, University of Amsterdam 1997 Discovery optical afterglows Gamma-ray Bursts 1999 PhD Astrophysics (cum laude), University of Amsterdam 1999 CfA Fellowship Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 2002 Co-founder Department of Astrophysics, Radboud University 2002 VIDI award NWO 2002 EU Descartes Prize for Gamma-ray bursts 2006 Chair Department of Astrophysics, Radboud University 2006 Co-PI European Galactic Plane Surveys (IPHAS/UVEX/VPHAS+) 2006 Project Scientist X-Shooter spectrograph for ESO-VLT 2009 Member Young Academy, Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences 2011 Sabbatical California Institute of Technology 2012 Chair NOVA Netherlands Research School for Astronomy 2013 PI BlackGEM array and MeerLICHT telescope 2015 Direct detection gravitational waves (GW150914) 2016 Breakthrough Prize 'Gravitational waves' 2016 Gruber Cosmology Prize 2017 Elected member Holland Academy of the Science (KHMW) | |
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Paul Groot Department of Astrophysics Radboud University P.O. Box 9010 NL-6500 GL Nijmegen ![]() The Netherlands pgroot 'at' astro.ru.nl |