Vuk Mandić (born April 20, 1975, in

Priboj Priboj ( sr-Cyrl, Прибој, ) is a town and municipality located in the Zlatibor District of southwestern Serbia. The population of the town is 13,172, while the population of the municipality is 23,514. Geography The municipality of Priboj i ...

Serbia , image_flag = Flag of Serbia.svg , national_motto = , image_coat = Coat of arms of Serbia.svg , national_anthem = () , image_map = , map_caption = Location of Serbia (gree ...

) is a Serbian-American astrophysicist and professor of physics and astronomy at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

. In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of ...

(APS). (search on year=2017 and institution=University of Minnesota)

Biography

He grew up in

Podgorica Podgorica ( cnr-Cyrl, Подгорица; ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Montenegro, largest city of Montenegro. The city is just north of Lake Skadar and close to coastal destinations on the Adriatic Sea. Histor ...

, where he received his elementary and secondary education. For his university education, he went to the United States. He graduated in 1998 with a B.S. in physics and mathematics from

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small group of institutes ...

(Caltech) and in 2004 with a Ph.D. in physics from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. His Ph.D. thesis advisor was Bernard Sadoulet. From 2004 to 2007 Mandic was supported by a Millikan Postdoctoral Fellowship at Caltech to work on the

LIGO The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool. Prior to LIG ...

project to search for

gravitational wave Gravitational waves are oscillations of the gravitational field that Wave propagation, travel through space at the speed of light; they are generated by the relative motion of gravity, gravitating masses. They were proposed by Oliver Heaviside i ...

s. In 2007 he became a faculty member in the department of physics and astronomy at the

, where he now is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor. In August 2017 he was part of the team that detected the

GW170817 GW170817 was a gravitational wave (GW) observed by the LIGO and Virgo detectors on 17 August 2017, originating within the shell elliptical galaxy NGC 4993, about 144 million light years away. The wave was produced by the last moments of the in ...

gravitational wave signal. He has chaired or co-chaired several committees for LIGO and for the Super

Cryogenic Dark Matter Search The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) is a series of experiments designed to directly detect particle dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (or WIMPs). Using an array of semiconductor detectors at millikelvin temperatu ...

. Mandic's research combines

general relativity theory General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity, and as Einstein's theory of gravity, is the differential geometry, geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of grav ...

, astrophysics, and astronomy. His collaborations with various scientific teams have resulted in more than 350 publications with cumulative citations over 92,000. His 2017 APS Fellowship citation is for "significant contributions to searches for primordial gravitational waves using LIGO data and for pioneering studies of the ultimate limits to low frequency sensitivity of ground based

gravitational wave detector A gravitational-wave detector (used in a gravitational-wave observatory) is any device designed to measure tiny distortions of spacetime called gravitational waves. Since the 1960s, various kinds of gravitational-wave detectors have been built ...

s".

References

External links

* * * (See Sanford Underground Research Facility#History.) * Stochastic Astrophysical Foreground from Compact Binary Mergers (Lectures 1 to 5) by Vuk Mandic, ICTS (International Centre for Theoretical Sciences) Summer School on Gravitational-Wave Astronomy, 05 - 16 July 2021 ICTS Bangalore Online Lectures, posted on YouTube, September 25, 2021 ** ** ** ** ** {{DEFAULTSORT:Mandic, Vuk 1975 births Living people Serbian physicists 20th-century American physicists 21st-century American physicists Astrophysicists University of California, Berkeley alumni California Institute of Technology alumni University of Minnesota faculty Fellows of the American Physical Society People from Priboj People from Podgorica