Luis Lehner
  • Assoc. Prof. (PhD. University of Pittsburgh 1998)
  • 294D Nicholson Hall
  • Phone: 225-578-0016
  • Advice i live by: "Anyone can get a Univ Degree. It takes work/study for a few years and one ends up with a degree forever. To be a gentleman (gentlewoman) one must work at it every single day". (from Luis Lehner Sr., PhD in Medicine. My Dad, who preferred to be called Mr. Lehner)
 

Here you will find a few lines on different subjects I have something to do with:


 

Research I've always found gravity and its effects fascinating. This lead me into General Relativity; Einstein's beautiful theory which holds the clue (at least in the classical regime) to fully understand gravity. The equations governing the graviational system are so involved that to decipher their message in the most interesting cases (strongly gravitating-highly dynamical regimes) one must resort to numerical simulations. I have been working in the field of Numerical Relativity (the sub-branch of General Relativity studying how to obtain these numerical implementations) since 1994. Obtaining a numerical simulation of any physical system, but in particular one described by Einstein equations is far from being a straightforward task. A large number of issues must be contemplated in this enterprise and my interests cover all of them. From analytical issues to writing implementations to be run on supercomputers. 


Service. I am a facilitator of the Binary Black Hole Mergers Focussed Group and also the Scientific Committee of the Caltech program on Gravitational Wave Source Simulations. I am referee for Phys. Rev. Letters; Phys. Rev. D; Class. Quantum Gravity and Journal of Computational physics . I've been in NSF-Rewview panels and acted as reviewer of NSF and NSERC proposals.


Honors & Awards. I received the Honor Prize in 1993 from the National University of Cordoba, Argentina. I also held a Mellon pre-doctoral fellowship in 1997. In 1998 I received the CGS/UMI outstanding dissertation award and the Nicholas Metropolis award in 1999. I  was a PIMS fellow from 2000 to 2002 and a CITA National Fellow in 2001-2002. I was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (2003-2005). I am now a CIAR associate member, a fellow of the Institute of Physics, editorial Board member of Classical and Quantum Gravity and a member of the NSF-Cyber Infrastrucuture User Advisory Committee


Background. I was born in 1970 in Cordoba, Argentina. I studied physics at FaMAF (National University of Cordoba) and came to the USA in 1994 to the University of Pittsburgh. I got my PhD in 1998 under the direction of Jeffrey Winicour. From there I moved to the University of Texas at Austin (1998-2000) and then to the University of British Columbia (2000-2002) as a postdoc.