Roman Berens

Bio

I am a theoretical physicist interested in general relativity and relativistic astrophysics, with a particular focus on black holes. I have been a postdoctoral researcher at Vanderbilt University as part of the Initiative for Gravity, Waves, and Fluids since 2023. I received my Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2022 and my undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 2016.

You can read more about my research here.

Research

My research is on general relativity and relativistic astrophysics. My work has involved the study of black holes from various perspectives. Most recently, I have investigated gravitational perturbations around spinning black holes with a paper on the problem of metric reconstruction. I have also been involved with the Black Hole Explorer project, which seeks to image the photon ring around supermassive black holes. In that context, I worked on developing visualizations of the spacetime around a black hole via the trajectories of highly lensed photons.

Previously, I explored the geometric aspects of black holes, using a new symmetry to more elegantly explain a well-known property of black holes, namely the vanishing of their static Love numbers. That work also used the same geometric methods to analyze quasinormal modes of scalar fields in de Sitter spacetime. In a separate project, I took an astrophysical view, exploring via simulations the intricacy of the trajectories of charged particles around a black hole with ambient electromagnetic fields and the possibility of such a black hole acquiring an electric charge. Lastly, during my Ph.D., I studied a model of black hole formation in a de Sitter background in an extension of general relativity known as massive gravity.

An up-to-date list of my publications can be found on INSPIRE.
My CV can be viewed here.

Contact

I can be reached at roman dot berens at vanderbilt dot edu.

• GitHub

Elements

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