Rate My Professor Amanda Farah

Amanda Farah is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) at the University of Toronto. She is an active member of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Scientific Collaboration. Her research focuses on using populations of gravitational-wave sources to learn about the Universe, including insights into compact object formation, binary stellar evolution, dense stellar environments, the expansion of the Universe, and gravitational lensing. She extracts this information by inferring the population of merging compact object binaries from gravitational-wave data.

Farah completed her PhD in Physics at the University of Chicago in 2025, where she worked with Professor Daniel Holz; her thesis was titled “Astrophysics and cosmology with the mass distribution of gravitational wave sources.” She earned a BA in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018, graduating magna cum laude with departmental honors. Prior to her current role, she held several fellowships during her graduate studies, including the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2020–2025) and the William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship (2024–2025) at the University of Chicago. Her key publications include papers such as “The steep redshift evolution of the hierarchical merger rate may cause the redshift-effective spin correlation” (2026, accepted in The Astrophysical Journal Letters), “No need to know: astrophysics-free gravitational-wave cosmology” (2024, The Astrophysical Journal), and contributions to LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration papers including GWTC-4.0 on population properties of merging compact binaries (2025). She has delivered numerous invited academic talks on topics including gravitational-wave cosmology and population studies of gravitational-wave sources, and has contributed to public outreach and teaching activities.