I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (CAMK) of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. My research focuses on black holes, the formation of compact-object binaries and gravitational-wave sources, and the dynamical evolution of dense stellar systems such as globular clusters and nuclear star clusters.

Download my latest CV.

I am the principal investigator of the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) SONATA grant “Bridging Observations and Theory: Synthetic Star Cluster Observations from Numerical Simulations”. The project uses numerical simulations and synthetic observations to connect theoretical models of star cluster evolution with observations. My research group includes Dr. Renuka Pechetti and doctoral student Arthur Silva Magalhães.

From 2023 to 2025, I was the principal investigator of the POLONEZ BIS 1 project “Growing Black Holes in Star Clusters” (BHGrowth). This project was 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 COFUND action.

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

I completed my PhD in May 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Mirek Giersz at CAMK. During my PhD, I studied the dynamical evolution of globular clusters and their populations of compact objects and exotic binary systems using Monte Carlo simulations with the MOCCA code and direct N-body simulations.

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 after receiving a scholarship to study at University College Utrecht (UCU) at Utrecht University. In 2009, I graduated from UCU with a double major in natural sciences (mathematics, physics, and astronomy) and the humanities (philosophy, religious studies, and history). I then spent a semester studying philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In Fall 2010, I joined the Erasmus Mundus AstroMundus programme, a two-year master’s degree in astronomy and astrophysics offered by a consortium of five universities. During the programme, I studied at the universities of Innsbruck, Padova, and Belgrade. In November 2013, I moved to Warsaw to begin my PhD at CAMK.