Harald Pfeiffer

Harald Pfeiffer (born 1974) is a German astrophysicist at the University of Potsdam.

Education and career Pfeiffer attended the Steigerwald-Landschulheim-Weisentheid, graduating in 1993. In 1993, he participated in the International Physics Olympiad, winning a gold medal. He studied physics at the University of Bayreuth from 1994 to 1997, before continuing to the University of Cambridge from 1997 to 1998. Following this, he attended Cornell University, completing his PhD in 2003. Between 2003 and 2009, he was employed at California Institute of Technology, first as a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Scholar, and then as a Senior Postdoctoral Scholar. He then took up a position as associate, and then assistant, professor at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto.

Since 2017, Pfeiffer has been a group leader in the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity department at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, and a professor at the university of Potsdam.

Together with Lawrence Kidder and Mark School, he is a lead developer of the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC), which solves numerically the partial differential equations describing compact binary coalescences. Using this code, they are able to predict the gravitational waveforms produced by such systems, which can then be searched for in detector data.

Pfeiffer is also interested in improving the theoretical understanding of the properties of the Einstein Field Equations, and exploring possible alternative theories of gravity.

Awards

2015: Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award 2016: Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics