Daniel Joseph Oliver

NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center Postdoctoral Fellow at Oregon State University

Summary

Daniel J. Oliver

I am a NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center Postdoctoral Fellow at Oregon State University, working with Dr. Jeffrey Hazboun and Dr. Xavier Siemens. My research spans the gravitational wave spectrum: at nanohertz frequencies, I analytically model a pulsar timing array's sensitivity to anisotropic gravitational wave backgrounds. I also work on characterizing the noise in pulsars through customized chromatic noise modeling for NANOGrav datasets. At millihertz frequencies, I continue my LISA-focused work begun during my Ph.D. on highly eccentric EMRIs, known as “peeps”. For more information on these projects, see the Research tab.

I received my B.S. in Physics from Oklahoma State University in 2017 with a thesis on slow noise in a laser with injected signal, and completed my Ph.D. in Space and Planetary Sciences (concentration in gravitational wave astrophysics) at the University of Arkansas in 2024 with a dissertation on Improved Modeling of Highly Eccentric EMRIs for LISA Signal Confusion Noise. Between 2023 and 2024 I was a Visiting Student Researcher with the TAPIR group at Caltech, collaborating with Dr. Curt Cutler at JPL on LISA data analysis. For more information, see the CV tab.

EMRI Animation

An interactive visualization of an extreme mass ratio inspiral, similar to those studied during my graduate research. The orbiting compact object traces out a relativistic orbit around the central massive black hole, while the strain panel below shows the resulting gravitational wave signal.

The orbital evolution and waveform are computed live in the browser using the Analytic Kludge of Barack & Cutler (2004); further details are available in the animation source repository.