Ilya Mandel

Ilya Mandel received a Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2008, with a specialization in gravitational-wave astronomy, under the supervision of Kip S. Thorne. He carried out postdoctoral research at Northwestern University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a National Science Foundation astronomy and astrophysics postdoctoral fellow. Mandel moved to the University of Birmingham, UK as a Lecturer in 2011, and was promoted to Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics in 2016. In 2019, Mandel joined Monash University as a Professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy.

Ilya is interested in all aspects of theoretical astrophysics, with a particular focus on strong gravitational fields, compact objects, and gravitational-wave astronomy. He has co-authored more than 250 papers on the evolution of massive stellar binaries, gravitational-wave data analysis, astrostatistics, and related topics. His current research focuses on the exploration of the evolution of massive binary stars into compact binaries as sources of gravitational-waves and astrophysical inference on gravitational-wave observations, the dynamics in galactic centres and globular clusters, probes of general relativity in the strong-field regime, tidal disruption events, kilonovae and GRB afterglows, and other things that go boom in the night.