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Konstantinos (Kostas) Kritos is a NASA Hubble Fellow in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Stony Brook University, where he started in September 2026 as the first NHFP fellow hosted there. At Stony Brook he works with Prof. Rosalba Perna, his faculty host. His fellowship program is “Unveiling the mystery of massive black hole seeds through gravitational and electromagnetic waves.” He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Johns Hopkins University in 2026 under the supervision of Prof. Emanuele Berti and Prof. Joseph Silk, with a thesis titled “Understanding the Dynamical Formation of Binary and Massive Black Holes with a Rapid Cluster Simulation Code”; his doctoral research was supported partly by the Onassis Foundation. He completed his undergraduate studies at the National Technical University of Athens in 2021 under the supervision of Prof. Alexandros Kehagias, Prof. Ilias Cholis, and Prof. Antonio Riotto.
His research spans gravitational-wave astrophysics, dense stellar environments, and the growth of massive black holes, from stellar-mass mergers to JWST’s Little Red Dots. He has coauthored more than 25 peer-reviewed publications and developed Rapster, a rapid population-synthesis code for dynamical environments now used by research groups worldwide. Beyond compact binaries, his work includes primordial black holes, Thorne–Żytkow objects, gravitational-wave backgrounds in the early Universe, and tidal disruption events and extreme mass ratio inspirals around massive black holes. He has been a visiting scientist at GSSI, CIERA (Northwestern), the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, and the Flatiron Institute’s CCA.
He enjoys mentoring students, organizing journal clubs, and building bridges between the gravitational-wave and broader astrophysics communities.
Figure. Illustration of the gravitational-wave (GW) and electromagnetic observables addressed in his NASA Hubble Fellowship research program (adapted from his NHFP proposal): the observed massive binary black hole merger GW231123 (bottom left), the active galactic nuclei with putative supermassive black holes discovered by JWST (bottom right), and black hole mass growth through repeated mergers (middle). Shown in the top row are future GW observatories: the terrestrial Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer (top left), the lunar detectors LGWA and LILA (top middle), and the space-borne LISA (top right). Also shown at the bottom are the infrared JWST and the optical LSST.
Header image: the center of the Milky Way seen by NASA's Great Observatories (Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra). Credit: NASA, ESA, SSC, CXC, and STScI.
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