Richard Brito's got a PhD!

Richard Brito (IST, Lisbon) successfully defended his PhD thesis, entitled "Fundamental fields around compact objects: Massive spin-2 fields, Superradiant instabilities and Stars with dark matter cores" with Vitor Cardoso and myself as supervisor and co-supervisor, respectively.

Richard was awarded a PhD with Distinction and Honours (the jury members were Eugeny Babichev, Carlos Herdeiro, José Lemos and José Natário) and is now moving to the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam as a postdoctoral fellow. Kudos Richard!

Richard Brito right after his PhD thesis defense, with supervisor Vitor Cardoso and jury members (from the left: Carlos Herdeiro, Eugeny Babichev, Vitor, Richard, Jose' Lemos, Jose' Natario)

Meetings in Lisboa

Right before Christmas I visited Lisbon to attend a conference and a workshop held at the Instituto Superior Técnico. It was a great opportunity to come back to Portugal after almost one year and meet a lot of friends and colleagues there.

Ginjinha physics in Lisbon

Most of the participants of the "Strong Gravity Beyond to GR: from theory to observations" Workshop,
having a typical Ginginha in Lisbon's city center.

The workshop is going great, as you may see. Besides drinking ginjinhas, all talks have been excellent and plenty of interesting discussions are going on. This totally compensates for the 18h/day-effort that we are putting on it!

This picture was taken 10 sec after the previous one. Funny thing: the guy on the bottom left, the lady at the center and the two guys on the right (who were not in the previous one) are just pedestrians who joined the photo for the sake of it, without even paying the workshop fee!

Workshop + School in Lisbon

Next two weeks will be very busy in Lisbon (i'm flying back tomorrow). Next week at IST we have the pleasure to host and organize the first "Strong Gravity Beyond GR: from theory to observations" workshop.

The workshop logo. Here is the webpage

The purpose is to organize a friendly and relaxed meeting for a limited number of scientists who work on gravitational theories aiming at correcting General Relativity and on experimental tests of gravity in general. Next few years will witness a wealth of new astrophysical data: second-generation interferometers promise to detect gravitational waves for the first time, very precise observations of the Milky Way center will allow to infer the properties of the supermassive black hole lurking at it and the exponential grow of cosmological observations will open new windows through which "The Theory" of gravity will reveal itself. This is just the perfect time to organize such a meeting in Europe! I'll try to report on the ongoing events, although each time i promise that I failed miserably...

The logo of the NR/HEP2: Spring School

Moreover, in two weeks from now the IST will host a Spring School on topics at the edge between Numerical Relativity and High Energy physics. The NR/HEP2: Spring School is an event organized within a long-term initiative involving the Universities of Aveiro, Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Rome Sapienza”, Barcelona, Belém do Pará in Brazil, Mississippi and the DAMTP at Cambridge U. Five intense days of lectures are scheduled and, beside one silly guy, i guarantee the speakers are all excellent and it will be fun.

Anyway, these are wonderful excuses for me to take a rest from Boston and enjoy Portuguese weather, food and friends... more soon from Lisboa!

De devulgationi eloquentia

Our gravity group in Lisbon have just published a series of short movies where many group members describe some general aspect of Einstein's theory and beyond.

Have a look at Videoteca do Gravitão, muito boa!

Check out all cool resources at our group's outreach webpage

V Black Holes Workshop in Lisbon

Five years ago, Portuguese scientists working in black hole physics started gathering right before Xmas time in a short and informal workshop. The first edition of the Black Hole Workshop was held in Porto and was a sort of reunion of people working worldwide and coming back home for holidays.

Visit the webpage of the V Black Holes Workshop

Over the years, the workshop extended to nonPortuguese people (I started attending it since the second edition) and it developed to what is now a regular international workshop. This year, we in CENTRA have the pleasure to host the fifth edition, which will be held in Lisbon next Monday and Tuesday. We'll have over 60 participants, about 30 talks and a social dinner at the delicious Restaurante dos Passarinhos!

PS:

If you are wondering what the workshop logo is, it's an artistic view (courtesy of Ana Sousa) based on a very typical decoration in Rossio's square, downtown Lisbon.