The 16th International LISA Symposium is honored to present speakers covering a broad range of topics related to LISA, gravitational wave detection, and the many areas of science gravitational waves inform. Please continue to check back as new speakers will be added as they confirm participation in the conference.
Tests of fundamental physics with LISA
Emanuele Berti
Johns Hopkins University
Emanuele Berti’s research focuses on black holes, neutron stars, gravitational-wave astronomy, and tests of general relativity. He is a Simons Investigator, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and former Chair of the Division of Gravitational Physics, a Fellow and former President of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the recipient of the 2023 APS Richard A. Isaacson Award in Gravitational-Wave Science.
Modeling gravitational wave signatures of supermassive black hole binary populations
Laura Blecha
University of Florida
Laura Blecha is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Florida. She received a Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics from Harvard University and was a NASA Einstein Fellow and a Joint Space-Science Institute Prize Postdoc at the University of Maryland before joining the UF faculty. She is the Astrophysics Working Group Co-Chair of NANOGrav and a Core Member of the LISA Consortium, and her research focuses on modeling gravitational-wave source populations and the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies.
An Overview of the LISA Optical Metrology System
Ryan DeRosa
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Ryan DeRosa is the LISA Mission Systems Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. His research focuses on instrumentation for interferometric gravitational wave detectors. He has been part of the NASA LISA development team since 2017. Before that he was part of the LIGO commissioning team, from the Enhanced LIGO experiment through the era of first discoveries.
Astrophysics and EMRIs: NSCs, TDEs, AGNs, QPEs, CLQs and all the acronyms, oh my!
K.E. Saavik Ford
City University of New York BMCC/Graduate Center
American Museum of Natural History
Prof. Ford is the co-originator of the AGN channel for producing merging stellar mass binary black holes (as detected by LIGO), and continues to work on the theoretical underpinnings of the channel, attempting to use a combination of GW and EM (electromagnetic) observations to better understand AGN disks and their interactions with Nuclear Star Clusters. She is broadly interested in the consequences of having 'things' in AGN disks, including stellar mass black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs, and main sequence stars.
Gravitational wave observatories from the ground to pulsar timing arrays
Joey Shapiro Key
University of Washington Bothell
Joey Shapiro Key is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Washington Bothell serving as a member of the international LISA Science Team. She earned a PhD in Physics from Montana State University and a BA in Astrophysics from Williams College.
What will be in the LISA catalog?
Astrid Lamberts
CNRS - Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur
Astrid Lamberts is a gravitational wave astrophysicist working in Nice, France. She does population models for multimessenger science of the Milky Way and spends a lot of time thinking about making LISA data as user-friendly as possible. She is also one of the PIs of the French contribution to LISA.
The Who What When Why and How of the LISA Global Fit
Tyson Littenberg
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center
Tyson Littenberg is a Research Astrophysicist at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and the Lead Scientist for the NASA LISA Analysis Center, responsible for developing, implementing, and operating data analysis pipelines for the NASA LISA Project.
Waveform modelling with phenomenological models
Antoni Ramos-Buades
University of the Balearic Islands
Dr. Ramos-Buades's research centers on gravitational-wave source modeling, with an emphasis on numerical relativity studies of binary black hole systems. He works toward improving waveform accuracy for current ground-based detectors in the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration and future space-based missions such as LISA, while also investigating the data analysis applications of these models.
Challenges and Strategies for Telescope Follow-up of LISA MBHB Mergers
John Ruan
Bishop’s University
John is an Associate Professor at Bishop’s University in Quebec, Canada. He is broadly interested in time-variable electromagnetic emission from gravitational wave sources, as well as their host galaxy properties.
The LISA Consortium: updates and how to get involved
Niels Warburton
University College Dublin
Niels Warburton is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor at University College Dublin. His research focuses on the gravitational wave emission from small mass ratio binaries. In 2025 he was elected as the Spokesperson for the LISA Consortium. He also co-leads the Multiscale Self-force Collaboration and the Black Hole Perturbation Toolkit. From 2018 to 2024 he was a co-chair of the LISA Consortium Waveform Working Group.