S. P. Stevenson

Dr Simon Stevenson is a postdoctoral researcher and Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Dr Stevenson is an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav). Dr Stevenson's research focuses on the new field of gravitational-wave astronomy. Gravitational-waves were first directly observed from colliding black holes in 2015, and are now being observed on a weekly basis from neutron star and black hole binaries. How these compact binaries form is an open topic in the astrophysics community, and one that Dr Stevenson is keen to answer. Dr Stevenson uses computer simulations of the evolution of massive binary stars through supernovae and common envelope evolution to predict the properties of gravitational-wave sources and uses advanced statistical techniques to compare them to the emerging gravitational-wave population.