Tomasz Bulik (Prof. and project manager sins January 2024_
Professor at the Astronomical Observatory at the University of Warsaw. He is a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He graduated from the Department of Physics in Warsaw in 1988, and then obtained his PhD at the Pennsylvania State University in 1993. He spent the following years at the Enrico Fermi Institute at The University of Chicago. In 1996 he moved back to Poland and worked at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center in Warsaw. Since 2005 he has been working at the University of Warsaw. During his career he has worked on subjects in theoretical astrophysics, such as investigations of X-ray binaries, physics of strong magnetic fields, the origin of gamma ray bursts, structure and properties of neutron stars. He has initiated the work on binary population synthesis, a topic that lead to interest in gravitational wave astrophysics. The effort done in collaboration with his former student and now a coworker prof. Belczynski resulted in prediction that the most prominent sources of gravitational waves are binary black holes, which has been recently confirmed by LIGO. He is member of the VIRGO collaboration and he has participated in the discoveries of gravitational wave sources. He has also participated in the high energy gamma ray observations with HESS. Tomasz Bulik was the leader of the site search and characterization campaign for CTA. He is also involved the preparation of the next generation gravitational wave observatory – the Einstein Telescope. Currently he is working on properties of binary gravitational wave sources and also on reduction of low frequency noise in the VIRGO detector. He is also involved in the Einstein Telescope.
Krzysztof Belczynski (Prof. and project manager)
A graduate of Nicolaus Copernicus Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Ph.D. 2001), he did 4 pre/post-doctoral fellowships in USA (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Northwestren University, New Mexico Sate University, Los Alamos National Laboratory) before coming back to Poland. He has developed an early testing grounds for predictions and astrophysical information inference from gravitational-wave detections (the StarTrack population synthesis code). He also was an avid rock climber (several new lines in Patagonia, Alaska, Karakoram, Baffin Island), and now he retired to snowboarding and kitesurfing.
Professor Belczynski unexpectedly passed away on January 14, 2024.
Current CV attached below:
Arkadiusz Hypki (Post-Doc)
His scientific interests concern star clusters, especially globular star clusters. An active developer of the MOCCA code (http://moccacode.net), the code which is able to perform full stellar and dynamical evolution of real size star clusters. He is also a main developer of the BEANS code (http://beanscode.net) which is a general tool for distributed data analysis of Big Data.
Grzegorz Wiktorowicz (Post-Doc)
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Aleksandra Olejak (PhD candidate)
She is a second year PhD student at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (Warsaw) under the supervision of prof. K. Belczynski. A graduate from University of Warsaw with a master degree in Astronomy. Her main scientific interests are: evolution of massive stellar binary systems, population of merging compact binaries and the origin of LIGO/Virgo detected gravitational-wave signals. Apart from science her interests are psychology, traveling etc. She has also started her adventure with sailing, diving and kitesurfing. Current CV attached below:
Amedeo Romagnolo (PhD candidate)
He is a first year PhD student at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center. He graduated in Space Sciences at the University of Liège (Belgium) and he has been a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Reinhard Genzel’s Infrared Department. His main PhD research interests are stellar evolution and the physics of the gravitational waves sources. Outside his PhD program he is involved in both theoretical simulations and interferometric observations of exoplanets, which lead him to be part of the LIFE space mission. In his free time he is a freelance science communicator in an European think magazine (NEOS), he is learning classical singing, he is a rock climber, a veteran Dungeons and Dragons player and a pedantic philosophy enthusiast. He tries to travel and see the World as much as he can. Current CV attached below:
Pawel Drozda
Paweł is a graduate of the University of Warsaw. The fields of research he is involved in are double compact objects and large scale structures. Recently he was studing BH-NS binaries with prof. K. Belczynski in terms of the fist mass gap and kilonovae.