Nikolaos Karnesis

Dr. Nikolaos Karnesis is a prominent Greek physicist specializing in Gravitational Wave Astronomy and is currently a researcher at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), specifically within the Department of Astrophysics, Astronomy and Mechanics. After completing his undergraduate studies in Applied Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the National Technical University of Athens, he pursued and obtained his PhD from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Institute of Space Sciences of Catalonia (IEEC-CSIC). His extensive postdoctoral career has included prestigious fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (AEI) in Germany and the Astroparticle and Cosmology laboratory (APC) in Paris, before moving to AUTh as an MSCA Fellow. Dr. Karnesis’s research is deeply focused on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, the future European Space Agency (ESA) flagship observatory designed to detect gravitational waves in the lower-frequency band (millihertz) from space. He is a full member of the LISA Consortium and has recently been selected for the governing LISA Science Team (LST), which guides the mission’s development and operation. His primary scientific contributions involve the crucial areas of data analysis and instrument calibration for space-borne gravitational wave detectors, which are vital for successfully extracting faint gravitational wave signals from instrumental noise. This involves developing sophisticated computational methods, including stochastic algorithms and machine learning techniques, to handle the vast number of overlapping gravitational wave sources expected in the LISA data stream. Prior to his current work on LISA, Dr. Karnesis was an active member of the LISA Pathfinder (LPF) mission Science Team, the successful precursor mission that tested the fundamental technologies required for LISA. His doctoral and postdoctoral work contributed directly to the mission’s operations by developing the Bayesian data analysis pipelines, analyzing real-time data, and designing on-board experiments. His expertise also extends to analyzing signals from various sources that LISA will observe, such as stellar-mass black-hole binaries and the millions of ultra-compact white dwarf binaries in our Galaxy, and searching for the elusive stochastic gravitational wave background of astrophysical or cosmological origin.