Sebastian Völkel

Dr. Sebastian Völkel is a Senior Scientist/Leibniz Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam, Germany, where he is part of the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity department led by Prof. Alessandra Buonanno. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at SISSA and IFPU in Trieste, Italy, in the ERC group of Enrico Barausse, and completed his PhD at the University of Tübingen under Kostas D. Kokkotas. He holds a summa cum laude doctorate in Theoretical Astrophysics.

His research centers on the quasi-normal modes of compact objects—neutron stars and black holes—using gravitational wave observations to probe their internal structure and test general relativity. He investigates inverse problems, aiming to reconstruct spacetime properties from observed oscillation spectra. His work spans theoretical modeling, data analysis, Bayesian inference, and the development of parametrized frameworks for modified gravity. He also studies black hole shadows, Hawking radiation analogs, and neutron star equations of state.

Dr. Völkel has published over 30 articles in leading journals such as Physical Review Letters, Physical Review D, and Classical and Quantum Gravity. His recent work includes ringdown spectroscopy, Bayesian parameter estimation, and systematic error analysis in gravitational wave models. He has contributed to major collaborations and reviews on black hole spectroscopy and fundamental physics with LISA.

• Promotionspreis of the University of Tübingen (2021)
• Finalist, DPG Matter and Cosmos Dissertation Prize (2021)
• Honorable mention, GWIC-Braccini Thesis Prize (2020)

He is actively involved in teaching, having lectured on general relativity at the Jürgen Ehlers Spring School, and in outreach, giving public talks and a podcast. He organizes workshops, leads journal clubs, and develops open-source software for quasi-normal mode analysis. He has served as a referee for Physical Review Letters, Classical and Quantum Gravity, and other journals.