Biography

Prof. Vuk Mandic is originally from Montenegro (former Yugoslavia). After completing his undergraduate degree in Physics and Mathematics at Caltech in 1998, he moved to the University of California at Berkeley to complete his Ph.D. in Physics. There he worked with Prof. Bernard Sadoulet on the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment, which brought him to the Soudan mine in northern Minnesota where the experiment took place. After completing his Ph.D. in 2004, Prof. Mandic moved back to Caltech where he received the Millikan Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on the search for gravitational waves with LIGO.

In 2007, Prof. Mandic started his faculty position at the University of Minnesota, where he currently has the title of a Distinguished McKnight University Professor. Along with his LIGO collaborators, he participated in the discovery of gravitational waves in 2015 and received multiple awards, including the  Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2016), the Gruber Cosmology Prize (2016), the Group Achievement Award in Astronomy (awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society in 2017), and the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (2017). He also participated in the first multi-messenger observation of an astrophysical event in 2017 - the merger of two neutron stars (GW170817) that resulted in a short Gamma Ray Burst and a kilonova. Prof. Mandic's research focuses on searches for the stochastic gravitational wave background using terrestrial and space-borne gravitational wave detectors, as well as on searches for dark matter using the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment. Prof. Mandic leads the training program for graduate students titled Data Science in Multi-Messenger Astrophysics, and serves as the Director of the Center for Excellence in Sensing Technologies and Analytics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.