Paul Groot

Prof. Paul Groot is a Professor of Astrophysics at Radboud University (Nijmegen, Netherlands) and holds a SARChI Chair in Fast Transients and Gravitational Wave Astronomy at the University of Cape Town and South African Astronomical Observatory. He co-founded the Department of Astrophysics at Radboud University (2002) and served as its chair (2006–2016). He was also chair of the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA, 2012–2016).

His research focuses on compact binary systems, gravitational wave sources, and astronomical instrumentation. Key projects include leadership of the BlackGEM telescope array in Chile for gravitational wave optical counterpart detection and the MeerLICHT telescope in South Africa for radio-optical transient studies. He was Project Scientist for the VLT X-Shooter spectrograph and co-initiator of the European Galactic Plane Surveys.

Major awards include the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (shared with LIGO collaboration) and the 2016 Gruber Cosmology Prize. His educational background includes a PhD from the University of Amsterdam (1999) and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.