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Alexander Pace

Alexander Pace — Computational Scientist 3 — Staff
Office: 334B Whitmore Laboratory
Address: 0104 Davey Laboratory University Park, PA 16802 US
aep14@psu.edu
+1 814 865 6995
Alexander Pace
Physics LIGO Gravitational Waves Multimessenger Astrophysics IGC

IGC member and PSU LIGO staff scientist since November 2015. Current work focuses include development and maintenance of the Gravitational-Wave Candidate Event Database (GraceDB), and packaging, optimization, and benchmarking of the GstLAL gravitational-wave detection pipeline. Work areas include web services, high-performance computing, software optimization and containerization.

Reformed aerospace engineer; previous interests in high-performance computing and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). High-speed flows and high-speed vehicle aerodynamic and aerothermal performance.

Publications
  1. Kipp Cannon, Sarah Caudill, Chiwai Chan, Bryce Cousins, Jolien Creighton, Becca Ewing, Heather Fong, Patrick Godwin, Chad Hanna, Shaun Hooper, others “GstLAL: A software framework for gravitational wave discovery.” SoftwareX 14 (2021)
  2. C. Hanna, others “Metric Assisted Stochastic Sampling (MASS) search for gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.15463 (2021)
  3. Ryan Magee, Deep Chatterjee, Leo Singer, Surabhi Sachdev, Manoj Kovalam, Geoffrey Mo, Stuart Anderson, Patrick Brady, Patrick Brockill, Kipp Cannon, others “First demonstration of early warning gravitational-wave alerts.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters 910 2 (2021)
  4. Chiwai Chan, Kipp Cannon, Sarah Caudill, Heather Fong, Patrick Godwin, Chad Hanna, Shasvath Kapadia, Ryan Magee, Duncan Meacher, Cody Messick, others “Improving the background estimation technique in the GstLAL inspiral pipeline with the time-reversed template bank.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.03025 (2020)
  5. Patrick Godwin, Reed Essick, Chad Hanna, Kipp Cannon, Sarah Caudill, Chiwai Chan, Jolien Creighton, Heather Fong, Erik Katsavounidis, Ryan Magee, others “Incorporation of statistical data quality information into the gstlal search analysis.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.15282 (2020)
  6. Cody Messick, Surabhi Sachdev, Kipp Cannon, Sarah Caudill, Chiwai Chan, Jolien Creighton, Ryan Everett, Becca Ewing, Heather Fong, Patrick Godwin, others “Automating the Inclusion of Subthreshold Signal-to-Noise Ratios for Rapid Gravitational-Wave Localization.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.02457 (2020)
  7. Surabhi Sachdev, Ryan Magee, Chad Hanna, Kipp Cannon, Leo Singer, Javed Sk, Debnandini Mukherjee, Sarah Caudill, Chiwai Chan, Jolien Creighton, others “An early-warning system for electromagnetic follow-up of gravitational-wave events.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters 905 2 (2020)
  8. Ryan Magee, Heather Fong, Sarah Caudill, Cody Messick, Kipp Cannon, Patrick Godwin, Chad Hanna, Shasvath Kapadia, Duncan Meacher, Siddharth Mohite, others “Sub-threshold binary neutron star search in advanced ligo’s first observing run.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters 878 1 (2019)
  9. Surabhi Sachdev, Sarah Caudill, Heather Fong, Rico Lo, Cody Messick, Debnandini Mukherjee, Ryan Magee, Leo Tsukada, Kent Blackburn, Patrick Brady, others “The GstLAL Search Analysis Methods for Compact Binary Mergers in Advanced LIGO's Second and Advanced Virgo's First Observing Runs.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.08580 (2019)
  10. Stephen Ruffin, Alexander Pace “Calculation of radiation attenuation in particle-laced flows using a coupled approach.” Progress in Computational Fluid Dynamics, an International Journal 15 5 (2015)
  11. Alexander Pace, Stephen Ruffin, Michael Barnhardt “A coupled approach for predicting radiation attenuation in particle-laced flows.” (2011)
  12. Grant Palmer, Todd White, Alexander Pace “Direct coupling of the NEQAIR radiation and DPLR CFD codes.” Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets 48 5 (2011)
  13. Todd White, Grant Palmer, Alexander Pace “Direct Coupling of the NEQAIR Radiation and DPLR CFD Codes.” (2011)
  14. Alexander Pace, Stephen Ruffin, Deepak Bose “A Loosely Coupled Approach for Shock-Layer Radiation in DPLR.”
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.