Sarah Vigeland

"I initially started doing gravitational wave research as part of LIGO. I was an undergraduate, and one of my professors offered me a position doing research with him over the summer. I didn’t know anything about gravitational waves, but I have been fascinated by black holes since I was a kid. I got involved in pulsar timing arrays when I was a postdoc at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I went there planning to work on LISA data analysis, but since LISA’s future was pretty uncertain back in 2012, I ended up joining NANOGrav. I’m actually doing pretty similar work to what I did during my first summer doing research, but now the gravitational wave detectors are pulsars instead of man-made interferometers! We use the pulsars to detect gravitational waves with very long periods (months to many years)."

Sarah Vigeland is an Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee who develops techniques for detecting gravitational waves from supermassive black hole binaries. Sarah is a member of NANOGrav, a team that measures the timing of pulses from spinning neutron stars to detect gravitational waves. When Sarah is not doing her science she is knitting (mostly socks and sweaters), cooking and watching cooking videos on YouTube, or playing "Cities: Skylines" on her computer.