Eliot Finch

Postdoctoral Scholar at California Institute of Technology (2023-01 – Present)

LIGO SURF Mentor at California Institute of Technology (2025-06 – 2025-08)

• Co-mentored an undergraduate student (Serena Fink) with Simona Miller over the summer, working on a project related to using quasinormal-mode amplitudes to infer progenitor black-hole properties.

LIGO SURF Mentor at California Institute of Technology (2024-06 – 2024-08)

• Independently mentored an undergraduate student (Erin Coleman) over the summer, working on a project related to extracting ringdown quasinormal-mode amplitudes from numerical relativity simulations.
• Work resulted in a paper, submitted to PRD.

Astronomy Summer School Mentor at University of Birmingham (2023-06 – 2023-08)

• Helped mentor two undergraduate students (Nhat Pham, Daniel Robins) over the summer, performing data analysis on eccentric Galactic binaries (a potential LISA source).
• Work resulted in a publication in MNRAS.

Summer Student Mentor at University of Birmingham (2022-08 – 2022-09)

• Helped mentor three undergraduate students (Giorgia Bartolucci, Daniel Chucherko, Ben Patterson) over the summer, performing data analysis on LISA verification binaries.
• Work resulted in a publication in MNRAS.

Postgraduate Teaching Assistant at University of Birmingham (2019-01 – 2023-12)

• Example class demonstrator for Y1 and Y2 Mathematics for Physicists, and a lab demonstrator for Y2 Computing (Python).

RISE Germany Intern at Friedrich Schiller University Jena (2018-07 – 2018-09)

A RISE Germany internship with the Theoretical Atomic Physics Group (supervised by Dr. Jiri Hofbrucker).

• I investigated the dynamics of an atom simultaneously interacting with two photons and emitting a photoelectron.
• This involved analytical work to derive and understand expressions for the cross sections of the interactions, and numerical work using Mathematica to do calculations.

Work Intern at XCAM (2017-07 – 2017-09)

A work internship with the imaging system business XCAM.

• I developed Python code to control a camera system being developed by XCAM.
• This involved converting pieces of code from MATLAB, and writing new code to capture images and retrieve/display them with help from a TkInter GUI.

PhD in Physics & Astronomy – University of Birmingham (2019-01 – 2023-12)

MSci in Theoretical Physics – University of Birmingham (2015-01 – 2019-12)