Professor Paul Lasky
BSc (Hons), PhD
Special responsibilities – A member of the Committee Nominations Committee and AAL’s representative on the AAT Council.
Prof Paul Lasky is the Head of Monash Astrophysics and a former ARC Future Fellow. He is a Chief Investigator, Node Leader, and Gravity Key Project Leader on the new ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational-wave Discovery starting in 2024, and also Chair of the Executive Committee for the Australian Gravitational-wave Observatory Project.
Paul completed his PhD from Monash University in 2008, eventually returning there as a postdoc in 2014 after fellowships at the University of Tuebingen in Germany and the University of Melbourne. He was promoted to permanent staff at Monash in 2016, and has been head of the Monash Astrophysics group since 2023. Paul’s primary research is on gravitational-wave astronomy, including black hole and neutron star astrophysics. He is heavily involved in the international LIGO collaboration that made the first direct observation of gravitational waves from colliding black holes in 2015. He also made important contributions to the first multi-messenger gravitational-wave observation from colliding neutron stars in 2017.