Saketh Muddu has been honored with the Charles W. Misner Award
The University of Maryland's Physics Department student prize has been awarded again to a PhD student at the AEI Potsdam.
Saketh Muddu, who has recently completed his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam Science Park, will share the award with Rodrigo Silva from the University of Maryland. Established in 2021, the award recognizes outstanding thesis work in gravitation and cosmology. It is endowed with US$1,000.
“I am very pleased to receive this award, which has been established in honor of the esteemed Professor Charles W. Misner,” says Muddu, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Potsdam. “His legacy is deeply inspiring, and this recognition motivates me to continue contributing to gravitational physics with renewed focus.”
Muddu was awarded the prize by the jury for “For insightful advances in the analytical treatment of strong-field gravitational effects near compact objects in binaries, including quasi-normal mode oscillations, and their connection to scattering amplitudes”.
His research focuses on how microscopic physics – such as horizon dynamics or dense matter effects – influence the dynamics of compact objects like black holes and neutron stars in binary systems. In order to understand how such physics enters binary dynamics, Muddu has analyzed the response of isolated compact objects to external gravitational perturbations. In particular, he has analytically studied the scattering of incident gravitational waves off black holes and neutron stars. These insights can be applied to binary systems, where the companion's gravitational field acts as a dynamic external perturbation. Muddu has also investigated the characteristic oscillations of generic, slowly spinning compact objects.
Saketh Muddu received his Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, in 2019. He began his PhD at the University of Maryland (UMD) in College Park in the same year and joined Professor Alessandra Buonanno’s “Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity” department at the AEI in December 2020. He completed his PhD in May 2025.
The Charles W. Misner Award, given by the University of Maryland Physics Department every two years, recognizes outstanding Ph.D. thesis work in the general areas of gravitation and cosmology, theory or experiment, by students in the UMD physics or astronomy department. This includes, but is not restricted to, classical and quantum gravity and cosmology, gravitational wave astronomy and physics, black hole astrophysics and early universe cosmology. The award, which is endowed with US$1000, is only bestowed when there is a qualified candidate of a high standard. It may also be shared by two candidates.
The first recipient of the Misner Award was Mohammed Khalil from Alessandra Buonanno’s department in 2021.