Oliver Long

My name is Oliver Long and I am a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin in Ireland. My research focuses on the numerical modelling of unbound binary black hole encounters. These high-energy systems allow us to probe the ultra-strong gravitational potential and increase our understanding of General Relativity. To explore these systems, I employ a range of methods, including numerical relativity for the comparable mass case and self-force techniques from black hole perturbation theory for extreme-mass ratio scenarios.

I am a member of the SXS collaboration, the LISA Consortium, and a former member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC). Additionally, I am a contributor to the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC), and the KerrGeodesics package of the Black Hole Perturbation Toolkit.

I earned my MPhys in Physics from The University of Manchester in 2018 and then I completed my PhD in Mathematical Sciences at the University of Southampton in 2022 under the supervision of Prof. Leor Barack. My thesis, titled “Self-force for hyperbolic black hole encounters,” was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Following the PhD, I stayed in Southampton for a short postdoctoral position before moving to the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam, Germany in 2022, and then to University College Dublin in 2026.