In this series of posts, we sit down with a few of the keynote speakers of the 247th AAS meeting to learn more about them and their research. You can see a full schedule of their talks here, and read our other interviews here!
It has been exactly ten years since the first direct detection of gravitational waves (GWs), which are tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime (see the Astrobites Guide to Gravitational Waves). These ripples, created by the mergers of black holes and/or neutron stars in a binary, are now being routinely discovered by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA network of detectors. What can we learn about our universe with GWs? How and where do black holes and neutron stars in binaries form? Can we learn about cosmology with GWs? These are just some of the questions that Dr Fishbach has been at the forefront of deciphering for the past decade.
Maya Fishbach is an Assistant Professor at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), University of Toronto, and the winner of the 2025 Annie Jump Cannon Award for major contributions to the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics and cosmology, including inference of the black-hole merger rate and its implications for the formation of stellar-mass black holes, their host galaxies, and the expansion history of the universe.
Growing up, Dr Fishbach had always been interested in math and physics, which led her to pursue a double major during her undergrad at Yale. She discovered astrophysics quite late in undergrad, having learned she was terrified of breaking things working on experiments. “This turned out to be a good mix of applying physics and math, without the fear of breaking anything expensive (…) It’s less scary if I break my computer.” This led her to work on a couple of astronomy projects during undergrad, one on “Diffuse Interstellar Bands”, and her senior thesis on computational cosmology, where she worked on galaxy simulations.
She started graduate school at the University of Chicago in 2015, planning to work in cosmology. However, serendipitously, LIGO discovered gravitational waves for the first time in the same month she started grad school. She mentions, “gravitational waves just became a real observational science, for the first time (…) there were just so many possible directions, and nothing had really been chartered in detail before.” This led her to join the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and start working on astrophysical implications of detecting gravitational waves. She recalls her experience at the initial telecon calls with the newly formed “Rates and Populations” group within the collaboration, “as a new PhD student (that) didn’t really know anything, it was great, because so many of us didn’t know anything either. We were all just figuring it out together, so it was just a really nice time to get into gravitational wave astronomy.” During the beginning years of her PhD, she worked on using the initial detections to answer questions such as, What is the mass distribution of black holes and what does it tell us about how stars die? How often do binary black hole mergers occur in the universe?
Later, in 2017, LIGO-Virgo made another monumental discovery that completely changed the state of the field and the lives of many people working within it, including hers. A gravitational wave signal, GW170817, was detected for the first time from a binary neutron star merger, and this event was also seen across the electromagnetic spectrum, giving birth to the field of multi-messenger astronomy. Dr. Fishbach used this event to measure the Hubble Constant, which was the first time gravitational wave events were used to do cosmology.
Dr Fishbach graduated with her PhD in 2020, and gave the first zoom defence in her department due to the pandemic. She started her postdoc as a NASA Einstein Fellow at Northwestern, and mentions that her transition was easier because she did not have to move cities during a global pandemic and already knew many of the researchers at Northwestern through the LIGO collaboration. At the same time, she was co–leading one of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration papers on astrophysical implications using the second GW catalog, which helped her gain independence and new collaborators. At Northwestern, she immersed herself in a research group working on the theoretical side of progenitors of GW sources, delving into stellar evolution, mass transfer in binaries, and dynamics. She started working on projects that directly bridged stellar evolution to GW data analysis. She also worked on connecting compact objects being discovered through GWs to those known in our own Galaxy, such as in X-ray binaries.
In 2022, Dr Fishbach began as a faculty member at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), University of Toronto. She mentions that one of the benefits of becoming a faculty member is “having postdocs and PhD students who are interested in different things, and I’m along for the ride a lot of the times.” One area that she is particularly interested in is connecting black holes and neutron stars discovered through GWs to a new population of black holes and neutron stars that are now being discovered in the Galaxy with the help of Gaia. She mentions that a key theme of her research is trying to make connections between gravitational waves and other areas that she may not have known about before starting a research project, and using that as an excuse to learn about a new field and gain new collaborators. With many current and upcoming large–scale surveys such as LSST, she highlights that, “There’s so much data out there (…) How do we put things together? How do we make those connections? What kind of theoretical tools do we need to develop? What kind of simulations do we need to run to synthesize all of this information that’s coming in?”
The importance of outreach and global collaboration
Dr Fishbach is a strong advocate for public outreach and science communication. She mentions the importance of scientific literacy in forming public policy. She believes it is essential to, “build a scientific community, make scientific discoveries, and inspire (not just) ourselves as scientists , but also to inspire the public and, remind people that humanity is capable of positive and beautiful things.” She emphasizes the importance of having large international scientific collaborations such as LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA, especially in the current political climate where international cooperation is under threat.
Advice for undergraduate and graduate students
Dr Fishbach emphasizes that one should not be afraid of throwing out advice that does not resonate with them; people come from different circumstances, different backgrounds, and different working styles, and there may not be a one size that fits for all. She also highlights the importance of always making sure that one is enjoying what they’re working on, as research can often get time–consuming, and one should feel genuinely excited about both their research questions and also the methods they are using to answer them. However, she mentions that “it’s not going to be fun all the time, like, sometimes it’s also really hard. So, it’s always important for me at least to have other fun things going on (…) to have hobbies that have nothing to do with my job, and are completely separate.” She also finds it really important to have an enjoyable community of people to interact and work with, as supporting each other can significantly change one’s productivity and excitement for research.
Dr Fishbach’s plenary talk at AAS247 will provide an overview of the status of gravitational wave astronomy, delve deeper into recent results on what we have learned about how black holes and neutron stars form using gravitational waves, and highlight some of the exceptional events from their recently concluded observing run.
To hear more about Gravitational Waves from the Stellar Graveyard, tune into Maya Fishbach’s Annie Jump Cannon Prize Lecture at 8am MT on Thursday, January 8 at #AAS247!
Edited by: Bill Smith
Featured Image Credit: AAS
