DrNiels Warburton

I am a lecturer/assistant professor researching gravitational wave emission from merging black holes. From 2017 - 2025 I was a Royal Society - Research Ireland University Research Fellow. In 2025 I was elected as the Spokesperson for the LISA Consortium.

The primary tool I use in my research is black hole perturbation theory whereby the metric of the binary is expanded about an analytically known black hole solution for the more massive component. A major goal of this work us to produce gravitational waveform templates for use with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). I am a core member of the LISA Consortium where from 2018-2024 I was a co-chair of the Waveform Working Group and coordinator for the Extreme Mass Ratio Inspiral (EMRI) waveform Work Package. I am also a member of the LISA European Ground Segment (the Distributed Data Processing Centre). More recently, our work extending self-force theory to second-order in the mass ratio has shown that perturbation theory can be used to model intermediate mass ratio inspirals (IMRIs) and calibrate models for comparable mass ratio binaries.

I am a co-founder and a lead developer of the Black Hole Perturbation Toolkit. The goal of this repository of software and data is to reduce the time researchers spend (re-)writng codes and to reduce the barrier to entry to black hole perturbation theory and self-force calculations. The BHPToolkit has now been used in research presented in over 230 publications. I am also a developer of the FastEMRIWaveforms package (which I co-founded). This package is part of the BHPToolkit and the leading model for doing gravitational wave data analysis for EMRIs and IMRIs.

I work in the Relativity Group at UCD. With that larger group, my own group currently has two postdocs (Dr Susanna Barsanti and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow Dr Andrew Spiers) and one Research Assistant (Oleksii Yanchyshen). I have graduated 4 PhD students. All members of my group work on various aspects of modelling small mass-ratio binaries. I have also worked with final year theoretical physics students to develop virtual reality simulations of black holes for public engagement activities.