Maddalena Reggio Successfully Defends her Thesis

Maddalena Reggio, a student from Maastricht University carrying out her Bachelor thesis in the Centre of Gravity at the Niels Bohr Institute, successfully defended her thesis on the 12th of June in the historic auditorium A. Her research was on Probing Dark Matter Subhalos Using Gravitational Wave Lensing, supervised by Jose Ezquiaga and Luka Vujeva, consisted in exploring different types of dark matter, cold and warm, with the aim to further understand and explain the discrepancies arising in the current model used to describe our Universe.

In her work, she numerically simulated different galaxy models with dark matter substructure embedded to obtain and analyze the deviations between the different dark matter models arising in the lensing signatures. Her research provided insight on the rate at which these lensing effects should be observed which will be compared to future observations by gravitational wave detectors, to constrain the nature of dark matter present in the Universe.

June 19, 2026, 3:24 a.m.