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Dr Gregory Ashton

About me

I am a Senior Lecturer in Physics at Royal Holloway, University of London. I began my research career at the University of Southampton, working with Ian Jones and Reinhard Prix, where I completed my PhD in 2016 on Timing variations in neutron stars: models, inference and their implications for gravitational waves. Following this, I held a postdoc position at the Albert Einstein Institute, Hannover, before moving in 2018 to Monash University in Australia to work as an Assistant Lecturer with Paul Lasky. I then briefly joined the Institute for Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) at the University of Portsmouth, working with Laura Nuttall as a Research Fellow before taking up my current post. My research interest is the relativistic astrophysics of neutron stars and black holes. I am a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and co-chair the Collaboration's largest and most active observational science group, the Compact Binary Group.

News

RHUL dome A

RHUL BSc and MSc students using RHUL's astrodome to observe NGC 744 to find variable stars

RHUL dome B

The RHUL astrodome

Barcelona LVK

The conference venue: The Hotel Barcalona with views over Plaça Catalunya

Barcelona LVK

Mattia Emma presenting recently-published work on Comparing advanced-era interferometric gravitational-wave detector network configurations: sky localization and source properties .

Barcelona LVK

Ann Malz presenting her work on the application of Conformal Prediction to the GravitySpy glitch classification algorithm.

  • 11/09/2024 At SPINS-2024 Dr Adriana Dias gave a talk on observing step changes in the periodicities of PSR B1828-11.

  • 01/07/2024 Today I was invited to talk at the Gravitational Waves Astrophysics Conference 2024 on "An overview of observational results from the LVK detectors up to the fourth observing run". This was a for-the-LVK talk.

  • 18/06/2024 Calibrating gravitational-wave search algorithms with conformal prediction was published in PRD.

  • 15/06/2024 Today I lead the Physics department's contributions to the RHUL Science Festival, below is the "Big Bang" explosion from my talk on "Colliding black holes and what they can tell us about quantum gravity".

Big Bang

A gif of the Big Bang explosion: credit to Andrew Casey for getting the cryotechnics correct and not exploding the bin as well!

IJCLab

A photo of the presentation at the IJCLab

  • 18/03/2024 Ronaldas' paper is now published in Phys Rev D!

  • 13/03/2024 Mattia ran a IOP-supported student conference Physics is You!

  • 29/02/2024 New paper day: Calibrating gravitational-wave search algorithms with conformal prediction is on the arXiv and submitted to Phys Rev D.

  • 17/11/2023 New paper day: Work led by Ronaldas Macas Revisiting GW200129 with machine learning noise mitigation: it is (still) precessing

  • 07/Aug/2023 We hosted an In2Science student Pavan at RHUL. Pavan built the first iteration of the Duck Detector, a concept idea for a gravitational-wave outreach project (see image below). Overall the project was a success and afterwards Pavan said "He's relentless and passionate about physics and astronomy. He's handled the work experience like an absolute professional rightfully so. My experience couldn't have been any better, thanks to my mentor and his passion towards the subject and his willingness to outreach and teach the ways to young children. The best someone could expect." which I of course was very happy to hear.

Duck Detector

Image of the v1 Duck Detector

  • 18/May/2023 I gave a colloqium on Glitch-robust gravitational wave astronomy at Los Alamos (virtually).

  • 15/May/2023 I co-organised and helped to run the 6th GWOSC Open Data Workshop. Below is a map of all the study hubs!

ODW2023

The map of study hubs for the sixth GWODW

NAM2022

Image of the packed room at NAM 2022
GW190425 Vela