Hello!
I am Sasha Levina, a PhD Candidate in the GW Paleontology group in the Astronomy & Astrophysics department at UC San Diego. My research focuses on interpreting gravitational wave signals to learn about the lives, deaths, and environments of massive stars across cosmic time. In particular, I am interested in star formation histories and their effect on binary black hole merger populations.
The ability of a massive binary system to form a black hole binary that will merge within the age of the universe depends on the presence of heavy elements within the stars at birth. As a result, the binary black hole population detected by gravitational wave detectors can be used to gain insight into the cosmic star formation history, which encodes the chemical evolution of the universe. I am working on improving star formation history modeling in binary population synthesis in order to develop more accurate population models in anticipation of the rapidly growing number of gravitational wave detections by LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA.I use cosmological simulations of galaxy formation and evolution (such as IllustrisTNG) in combination with the binary population synthesis code COMPAS to probe the effects of the metallicity-dependent star formation history on the properties of the observable binary black hole population.
