Juno Chan Successfully Defends his Thesis

On 27 February, Juno Chan successfully defended his PhD thesis at the Niels Bohr Institute. His dissertation, From Searches to Inference: Towards the Discovery of Lensed Gravitational Waves, explores how gravitational waves can be distorted by gravitational lensing as they travel across the Universe, and how such effects can be identified in gravitational-wave observations.

In his work, Juno developed new strategies to improve the detection of lensed gravitational waves and investigated how wave-optics distortions can bias standard matched-filter searches. He also introduced a deep-learning framework that dramatically accelerates the statistical inference of lensed signals, enabling rapid and accurate analyses of candidate events such as GW231123.

After presenting the main results of his thesis, Juno answered questions from a committee consisting of Prof. Markus Ahlers (NBI), Dr. David Keitel, Senior Lecturer (Universitat de les Illes Balears), and Dr. Jonathan Gair, Group Leader (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, AEI), concluding the defense in a celebratory atmosphere with colleagues and friends gathered to mark the occasion.

March 5, 2026, 4:55 a.m.