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Dr David Benjamin Keitel

Dr David Benjamin Keitel
Tenured contract senior lecturer
Theoretical Physics
  • Despatx 012planta baixaComplex Balear de Recerca i Desenvolupament Tecnològic

Curriculum

Brief CV

David Keitel, as a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) since 2011 and the GRAVITY group at UIB since 2020, focuses his research on gravitational waves (GWs) from neutron stars and black holes. His work covers large-scale data analysis and the modelling and interpretation of astrophysical GW sources. DK studied physics and astronomy in Bonn, Germany with a semester at Stony Brook, NY and graduated with a diploma thesis (master's equivalent) on statistical methods for weak gravitational lensing in 2010. He obtained his doctorate from Leibniz University Hannover, Germany in 2014 for work at the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI) on searches for continuous waves (CWs) from spinning neutron stars and a concept for space-based GW detection. The resulting line-robust detection statistic has since become the standard tool for the world's most sensitive CW searches on the Einstein@Home platform. In 4 postdoc appointments at AEI, UIB, Glasgow (Scotland) and Portsmouth (England), DK has contributed to analysing the first-ever detections of GWs from compact binary coalescences (CBCs). He has worked on numerical relativity simulations of black hole mergers, including the precision prediction of remnant properties and the energetics of the coalescence, as code reviewer and developer for phenomenological waveform models used extensively across the field for parameter estimation and the astrophysical interpretation of CBCs, and on Bayesian parameter estimation for some of the most challenging detections. He has leading roles in various LSC activities, including as co-chair of the CW working group (since 2022), long-term maintainer and reviewer for CW analysis software in the LALSuite package; having led searches for a post-merger remnant of the binary neutron star merger GW170817; a leading role in the first searches for gravitationally lensed GWs; and as coordinator of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA science summaries for public outreach and their translations. DK is also a member of the LSC council member, LSC program committee and LSC management team. He has held a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship in Glasgow 2016-2018, Dennis Sciama Research Fellowship at Portsmouth 2018-2019, and Beatriz Galindo Distinguished Researcher position at UIB 2020-2023. At UIB he teaches classes at both the undergraduate and master level, has supervised 2 completed PhDs, 2 master and 2 TFG theses. DK is a co-author on over 170 LSC papers, has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers outside the collaboration (h-indices of 95/19 with/without LSC papers), and has presented at over 60 national and international conferences including 14 invited talks. Besides the LSC, he is a member of the LISA Consortium, Einstein Telescope Collaboration, Sociedad Española de Astronomía, International Astronomical Union, Royal Astronomical Society, American Physical Society and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. DK is the PI for Spanish national grant CNS2022-135440 and RES computing grants AECT-2023-1-0023, AECT-2023-2-0032, and AECT-2023-3-0020, the lead applicant for 5 successful application periods on the Artemisa machine learning platform, and he is or has been a member of the research team in several research projects funded at the state and autonomous levels in Spain (FPA2016-76821-P, PRD2018/24, PDR2020/11, PID2019-106416GB-I00, SINCO2022/6719, PID2022-138626NB-I00) and other RES computing grants for several tens of millions of CPU hours. He has received the I3 research excellence certificate and 2 positive sexenios evaluations. He also holds a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation in Portsmouth.

Teaching

Office Hours

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Teaching, 5 previous years

Subject Information
11268 - Relativity and Geometry
  • Master's Degree in Advanced Physics and Applied Mathematics2023-24
11269 - Gravitational Waves
11297 - Mass Data Processing Techniques
11309 - Research Seminars
21010 - Differential Equations I
21055 - Relativity and Cosmology

Research

Research groups

Group Membership type
Gravitational Physics Group, theory and observation (GRAVITY) Member
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