Department of Physics & AstronomyMaria Charisi

Maria Charisi

  1. Assistant Professor
Email Addressmaria.charisi@wsu.edu
Location0947D Webster Physical Sciences Building

Biography

Visit my personal website.

This link leads to an external website that is not hosted by the university. The views and content expressed are those of the faculty member and do not represent the official positions of the university.

Maria Charisi obtained her BSc in Physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and her PhD in Astronomy from Columbia University in the City of New York. Between 2017-2020, she worked as a NANOGrav (North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves) fellow in the TAPIR group at Caltech. From 2020-2023, she was a VIDA (Vanderbilt Initiative for Data-intensive Astrophysics) fellow at Vanderbilt University. Subsequently, she joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Washington State University as an assistant professor. In 2023, she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant and is a research fellow of the Institute of Astrophysics at the Foundation for Research and Technology–Hellas (University of Crete, Greece). She is broadly interested in supermassive black hole binaries, multi-messenger astrophysics combining massive datasets from electromagnetic time-domain and gravitational-wave data, the astrophysical interpretation of pulsar timing array data, etc. She is a member of the NANOGrav Collaboration, the International Pulsar Timing Array, the LISA Consortium, and the LSST AGN Science Collaboration.

Education

  • PhD Astronomy, Columbia
  • BSc Physics, University of Aristotle, Thessaloniki

Research Interests

  • Supermassive black hole binaries
  • multi-messenger astrophysics
  • time-domain and gravitational-wave astrophysics
  • pulsar timing arrays
  • big data and machine learning

Selected Publications

Google scholar (link)

  1. Multimessenger time-domain signatures of supermassive black hole binaries. Charisi, M., Taylor, S.R., Runnoe J., Bogdanovic T., Trump J.R. MNRAS, 510, 5929 (2020)
  2. Quasars with Periodic Variability: Capabilities and Limitations of Bayesian Searches for Supermassive Black Hole Binaries in Time-Domain Surveys. Witt, C. A. , Charisi, M., Taylor, S.R; Burke-Spolaor, S. arXiv:2110.07465
  3. Testing the relativistic Doppler boost hypothesis for the binary candidate quasar PG1302-102 with multi-band Swift data. Xin, C., Charisi, M., Haiman, Z., Graham, M.J., Stern, D., D’Orazio, D. J., Schiminovich D. MNRAS, 496, 1683 (2020)