Alex Lupsasca

Bio & CV

I am a theorist specializing in black holes, classical and quantum gravity, and relativistic astrophysics. I am the Project Scientist for the Black Hole Explorer and have been an Assistant Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Vanderbilt since 2022.

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I am a co-recipient of the 2024 New Horizons in Physics Prize from the Breakthrough Foundation (together with Michael Johnson) and was also awarded the 2024 IUPAP General Relativity and Gravitation Early Career Scientist Prize from the International Society on General Relativity & Gravitation for my work on black hole imaging.

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I received my undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University in 2011 and 2017, respectively, and was then a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2017 to 2020 before joining the Princeton Gravity Initiative as an Associate Research Scholar from 2020 to 2022. For more information, please consult my latest CV.

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I am currently developing a NASA mission proposal to launch a satellite into Earth orbit that will take the sharpest images in the history of astronomy: the Black Hole Explorer. BHEX is designed to peer all the way down to the event horizon of a black hole and measure the “photon ring” of light that orbits around it. Together with an international team of scientists and engineers, we are now hard at work designing and prototyping the instruments and spacecraft for BHEX. We are also gearing up to propose BHEX as the next NASA Small Explorers Mission, which is slated for a 2031 launch. The journey ahead will be difficult but we are excited for BHEX to fly and push our understanding of spacetime to the absolute limit. Please read more about BHEX here.

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I enjoy teaching both undergraduate and graduate classes and giving public talks. My work has been featured in many articles, which you can read about on the Press page. I am also interested in various ways of visualizing black holes—this has led me to collaborate with Stanford-based artist Pam Davis Kivelson on her black hole art and to produce with my group the different codes and animations listed on the Research page. Please check out our new Black Hole Vision app, now available on iOS.

Research

For a full description of my activities, please consult my latest CV (November, 2024).

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Publications

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Current Group

Trevor Gravely

graduate student

Roman Berens

postdoctoral researcher

In addition, as the Project Scientist for BHEX, I am fortunate to work closely with the wonderful students and postdocs on our excellent science and engineering teams.

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Right now, I am also co-supervising graduate students He Jia from Princeton University and Joseph Farah from the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as working with Princeton undergraduate Lennox Keeble, with whom I’ve written two papers.

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In the past, I worked with graduate students Hengrui Zhu from Princeton University (2021-2022) and Hadrien Paugnat from the Observatoire de Paris (2021–2022, now at the University of California, Los Angeles). At Harvard, I also co-supervised graduate students Delilah Gates (2018–2021, now at Harvard BHI), Mina Himwich (2019–2020, now at Princeton PCTS) and Yichen Shi (2017–2019, now a novelist).

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Government Funding

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Private Funding

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Later, a generous $300,000 gift from Will and Kacie Snellings enabled me to hire another postdoctoral researcher for 2 years (2021-2023) at the Princeton Gravity Initiative: Alejandro Cárdenas-Avendaño, who led the development of our code AART (Adaptive Analytical Ray Tracing) and is now a Richard P. Feynman Distinguished Fellow in Theory and Computing at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He will be joining the faculty at Wake Forest University next year (Fall 2025).

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More recently, I raised $350,000 in funding for BHEX from tech investor Fred Ehrsam. This seed funding was given to Vanderbilt University earlier this year and has provided crucial support for the initial development of the BHEX mission proposal.

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Technical Software

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Alejandro and Hengrui wrote an Adaptive Analytical Ray Tracing code: a numerical framework that exploits the integrability properties of the Kerr spacetime to compute high-resolution black hole images and their visibility amplitude on long interferometric baselines. This code is being used to forecast simulated observations with BHEX.

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Visualization Software

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Separately, Trevor has also developed a JavaScript ray tracer for light rays in the Kerr spacetime using the analytical formulas derived in my papers with Sam Gralla on the Null Geodesics of the Kerr Exterior and Lensing by Kerr Black Holes. With this code, Trevor produced the beautiful 3D animations described in our recent BHEX paper on Using the Photon Ring to Visualize Spacetime Around the Black Hole.

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Public Outreach

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Finally, I also collaborated with Pam Davis Kivelson, an artist based at Stanford University, to produce black-hole-inspired art displayed at Stanford. A video recording of our joint 2022 Stanford Physics colloquium is available on YouTube here.

Teaching

I love teaching at every level!

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Last year, I was invited to contribute a pedagogical chapter to a book on Recent Progress on Gravity Tests and wrote A Beginner’s Guide to Black Hole Imaging and Associated Tests of General Relativity.

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During my PhD, I was a teaching assistant for multiple courses, ranging from a freshman seminar on black holes and fundamental physics to a graduate course on electrodynamics. At Vanderbilt, I have taught four different courses, two at the undergraduate level and two at the graduate level:

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Physics For Future Leaders (PHYS 1020)

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General Theory of Relativity (PHYS 8160)

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Advanced Electrodynamics (PHYS 8021)

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Seminar in Presenting Physics Research (PHYS 3600)

Press

Black hole imaging and the photon ring have captured the public imagination. Here are some popular articles covering my work.

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Photon Ring

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Black Hole Explorer

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Holography

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Black Hole Energy Extraction

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Conformal Symmetry in the Sky

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Public Outreach

Contact

• Twitter

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