Rochester Institute of Technology

Richard O'Shaughnessy is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences and a Program Faculty in Astrophysical Sciences and Technology in the School of Physics and Astronomy. He completed his PhD at Caltech under Kip Thorne; held postdoctoral fellowships with LIGO-affiliated groups at Northwestern University, Penn State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; and joined the RIT faculty in 2014.

A member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, O'Shaughenssy's research focuses on how to discover and interpret gravitational waves produced by merging compact binaries like black holes and neutron stars, as individual events; as a population; and in broader astrophysical context.   He and his collaborators are known for their long history of publications exploring how frequently LIGO will detect different types of coalescing compact binaries, and what those detections will tell us. He is well-known for his body of work on precessing black hole binaries, connecting stellar astrophysics and binary evolution; dynamics in weak- and strong-field general relativity; and Bayesian parameter estimation.   To make multimessenger astronomy a reality, he and collaborators have developed several theoretical and computational tools to facilitate rapid, astrophysically useful low-latency parameter estimation.  O'Shaughnessy collaborates closely with CCRG colleagues to enable direct comparisons between LIGO data and state-of-the-art simulations of Einstein's theory of gravity.