Xisco Jimenez Forteza

Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Waves


Bio:

I was born in the beautiful mediterranean island of Mallorca (Balearic Islands). As a young teenager, I was positively shocked by the Carl Sagan series "Cosmos" who brightly quoted "Each star system is an island in space, quarantined from its neighbours by the light-years. I can imagine creatures evolving into glimmerings of knowledge on innumerable worlds, every one of them assuming at first their puny planet and paltry few suns to be all that is. We grow up in isolation. Only slowly do we teach ourselves the Cosmos". Then, as an islander, I like everything that has to do with the exploration of the uncertain events that go beyond the distant sea horizons. In my case, these horizons expand to hit galaxies, black holes, neutron stars etc.

In 2017, I obtained my PhD. degree in theoretical physics at the UIB General Relativity and Gravitation (GRG) group with the work entitled "Hierarchical data-driven modelling of binary black hole mergers".

Right After that, in 2017, I moved for two years to the magical city of Rome with the INFN fellowship for non-Italian researchers. There, I found a novel scientific perspective that conducted me to the exploration of tidal effects on neutron star mergers and the study of black hole overtones in the group led by Prof. Valeria Ferrari, Prof. Leonardo Gualtieri and Prof. Paolo Pani. In parallel, I was introduced to the zoo of alternative theories of gravity in my collaboration with the astrophysics group of the Universittà di Sant Angelo, Napoli.

On 2019 I joined the group of Observational Relativity and Cosmology at the Max Planck Institute of Gravitational Waves (Albert Einstein Institute) at Hannover.

'