Two RIT professors have won more than $1 million in federal funding in the area of gravitational-wave astronomy.
Carlos Lousto and Manuela Campanelli, won separate multi-year grants from the National Science Foundation.
The $600,000 grant will support Lousto's research modeling black holes orbiting and colliding with each other under extreme conditions.
A second grant for $435,000 will develop software tools to make computational astrophysics accessible to the wider scientific community and increase productivity in gravitational wave astronomy. The Einstein Tookit, led by Campanelli at RIT will provide tools for research focused on systems like black holes.
Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, who announced one of the grants earlier this week, notes that earlier this year, six researchers at RIT were among the authors of a paper announcing findings that confirmed the existence of gravitational waves originally predicted in Einstein's general theory of relativity.
