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.
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.
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.
CERN and University of Geneva
Chiara Caprini is staff at the Department of Theoretical Physics of CERN and Professor at the University of Geneva, on leave from CNRS (France). She is the founder of the LISA Cosmology Working Group and presently a member of the LISA Science Team. Her expertise focuses on how to use LISA observations to probe Cosmology, both the late-time and early universe.
Image Credit: Marina Cavazza/CERN
The University of Texas at Austin
Hsin-Yu Chen is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at UT Austin. She previously co-chaired the LISA Consortium Cosmology Working Package. Her research interests lie in gravitational-wave multi-messenger cosmology and nuclear astrophysics.
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.
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)
Francisco Duque is a postdoc researching how astrophysical environments in galactic centres, like accretion disks or dark matter structures, influence the formation, evolution and gravitational-wave signal of binary coalescences and thinking about strategies on how to detect these effects with LISA. He has recently been elected junior co-chair of the Fundamental Physics Working Group.
Image Credit: sevens[+]maltry
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.
Image Credit: Alex Irklievski
European Space Agency
Juan Pablo Rodríguez is a Payload System Engineer for LISA at the European Space Agency, based at ESTEC in the Netherlands. He has previously worked on other ESA science missions, including PLATO and JUICE, contributing as an AIT/AIV Engineer and Electrical Engineer. His work focuses on the engineering, integration, and verification of complex spacecraft payload systems.
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.
SRON Space Research Organisation Netherlands
Valeriya Korol is a LISA scientist at SRON in Leiden and a member of the LISA Science Team. She is a theoretical astrophysicist working at the interface of electromagnetic and gravitational-wave astronomy. At SRON, she contributes to the scientific preparation of LISA, which will detect gravitational waves from thousands of compact binary systems in the Milky Way. Her research combines theory- and data-driven modeling with gravitational-wave analysis to use stellar remnant binaries as tracers of the Galaxy’s stellar mass distribution and past history.
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.
Image Credt: Christophe Marcade
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.
European Space Agency (ESA)
Nora is the LISA Lead Project Scientist at the European Space Agency (ESA) and is based at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. She received her PhD in Astronomy from Ludwig‑Maximilians‑Universität working for the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Munich, where her research focused on intermediate‑mass black holes in globular clusters. Before her role at LISA she worked as NIRSpec Instrument and Calibration Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Her scientific work centers on black holes, stellar systems, galaxy nuclei, and N‑body simulations.
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.
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.
Texas A&M University
Krista Lynne Smith is an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on accretion onto supermassive black holes, the relativistic jets of blazars, AGN feedback and galaxy evolution, and binary supermassive systems. Dr. Smith specializes in massively multi wavelength astrophysics, using observatories from the Very Large Array in the radio to Fermi in gamma rays, with an emphasis on using exoplanet timing satellites like Kepler and TESS for high energy astrophysics. She is a member of the LISA Science Team, chair of the NICER User’s Group, serves on the AGN steering committee for Habitable Worlds Observatory, and a member of the AAS HEAD executive committee, as well as a Scialog Fellow focused on detecting binary AGN with LSST-Rubin.
University of Warsaw
Bogumiła Świeżewska is an Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw, Poland. During her PhD she was mostly interested in Higgs physics. Later her research interests focused on studying phase transitions associated with symmetry breaking in the cosmological context. She aims at contributing to probing early-universe phenomena using LISA.
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.