Cody Messick

"My current favorite painting is currently at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The title is 'Morning Sunlight on the Snow, Éragny-sur-Epte', and it was painted by Camille Pissarro. It's the only time I've ever seen something capture the way the world looks right after a fresh snow fall, when the sky doesn't look that different from the ground. And realizing that this seemingly-white landscape is filled with various blues and yellows took my breath away. My wife almost had to drag me away from it, and I kept finding excuses to come back to look at it for the rest of our trip to the museum that day. I'm also a huge music fan. I've followed Dead & Company, the latest iteration of the Grateful Dead, for short stints of their tours, and plan to do so again. I think the number one person, living or dead, that I'd love to get dinner with is Jerry Garcia, the original lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead. I'd love to get stories from Jerry about his touring days, and I think he'd be into hearing about gravitational waves."

Cody Messick is a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas at Austin. Cody develops and runs the GstLAL inspiral analysis, which searches for gravitational waves from merging black holes and neutron stars in real time. He was famously the first person to see the data from GW170817, the first neutron-star merger ever detected. Cody is big fan of board games (current favorite: Root), video games, dungeons and dragons, fantasy novels (favorite author: Brandon Sanderson, currently reading: Malazan Book of the Fallen), and kayaking. He and his wife frequently go on drives where they try to avoid main roads and go explore the woods or any state or national parks they can find. They'll spend all day exploring and choosing which direction to go on whims, and then use GPS to get back when they're done. (Photo credit: Michael Maimonem)