Geoffrey Mo | Carnegie Observatories and Caltech

About me

Hi! I’m a Brinson Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories and at Caltech. I earned my PhD at MIT, at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and at the LIGO Lab. Before that, I was an undergraduate at Carleton College.

I’m interested in how compact binaries form, evolve, and die, and how we might learn about them in both light and gravitational waves. In particular, I’m leading a Hubble ultraviolet time-domain survey of the globular cluster 47 Tuc to search for the binaries which live in these dense stellar environments. I’m also working on building Cerberus, a three-channel high-speed imager for the 200-inch Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory, which will provide precise photometry for characterizing binaries.

If you’d like to chat, feel free to email me at gmo@caltech.edu!

Research interests

Compact binaries: compact binaries in globular clusters, ultracompact binaries, Type Ia supernovae
Multi-messenger astrophysics: electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves, sky localization of gravitational waves
Instrumentation: low-noise, high-speed imaging
Transients in all-sky surveys: WINTER, NEOWISE
LIGO: low-latency infrastructure, gwcelery, detector characterization

Service

I am passionate about making physics and astrophysics more inclusive, and have been involved in efforts to make meaningful changes in my department and beyond.

Admissions for the MIT Summer Research Program, targeted at recruiting underrepresented undergradutes to spend a summer conducting research at MIT (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024)
Mentor for MIT PhysGAAP, a program to help prospective graduate students with their applications to help foster a diverse graduate student body (2023-2024)
MIT Kavli Institute coffee czar (2022 - 2025)
Faculty search committee, MIT Astrophysics (2021)
MIT Kavli Institute Anti-Racism Task Force (2020)
Various roles at Carleton, including being a Student Departmental Advisor and serving on the Departmental Curriculum Committee (2017-2019)

Teaching

I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to teach and mentor students at MIT and at Carleton.

MIT

TA for 8.021 E&M (Fall 2020, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024)
Graduate student mentor for three undergraduate researchers (2020-2022)

Carleton

Undergraduate TA and lab assistant for E&M, Contemporary Physics Lab, and Intro to Astronomy (2017-2019)
Department-appointed tutor for E&M

Publications

A list of my publications is available on ADS here.