About

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland where I work with Prof. Mirek Giersz and the MOCCA code development team. Broadly, my research is centered on black holes, formation of compact object binaries, gravitational wave sources, and the dynamical evolution of dense stellar systems like globular clusters and nuclear stellar clusters.

Click here to download to my latest CV.


I am the principal investigator of the POLONEZ BIS 1 project (2023 to 2025) on "Growing Black Holes in Star Clusters" (BHGrowth). This project No. 2021/43/P/ST9/03167 is co-funded by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 945339. This project focuses on investigating the different pathways by which black holes can grow in dense star clusters using state-of-the-art computer simulations.


From 2018 to 2023, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Lund Observatory, Division of Astrophysics, (Department of Physics, Lund University) in Sweden. At Lund, I worked with Dr. Ross Church in the 'Stellar Dynamics and Evolution' research group and also worked with Prof. Melvyn Davies.


I completed my PhD at the end of May 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Mirek Giersz at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. During my PhD studies, my research work focused on understanding the dynamical evolution of globular clusters and on investigating their populations of compact objects and exotic binary systems using Monte Carlo (the MOCCA code) and N-body simulation codes.


Click here to download to my latest CV.

I am originally from Lahore, Pakistan where I completed my higher secondary education in 2006. In Fall 2006, I moved to Utrecht in the Netherlands where I received a scholarship to study at University College Utrecht (UCU) of Utrecht University. In 2009, I graduated from UCU with a double-major in natural sciences (math, physics and astronomy) and humanities (philosophy, religious studies and history). Following UCU, I briefly spent a semester in 2010 studying philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Starting in fall 2010, I was selected for the Erasmus Mundus programme called “Astromundus”, this was a 2 year masters in astronomy and astrophysics offered by a consortium of 5 universities. During this masters course I studied at the universities of Innsbruck (Austria), Padova (Italy) and Belgrade (Serbia). In November 2013, I moved to Warsaw, Poland to start my PhD at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center.