Aleksandra Olejak

Aleksandra Olejak is a Ph.D. candidate at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (CAMK) in Warsaw and a scholar at the Geoplanet Doctoral School.

The supervisor of her doctoral thesis is Prof. Krzysztof Belczyński.

Her dissertation research mainly focuses on the evolution of isolated binary systems of massive stars, which can lead to the formation of tight systems of two compact objects (mainly black hole binaries) that are sources of gravitational waves received by the LIGO and Virgo detectors. For this purpose, she mainly uses the StarTrack population synthesis code, written by Prof. Krzysztof Belczyński and developed over the years, with the contribution of Aleksandra by extendindg included in the code physics by implementing new models for mass transfer stability or supernova explosion. In addition, she uses the StarTrack code to generate a synthetic population (cosmological or galactic) of compact object systems and then, for example, compare their properties with a database of compact objects known from electromagnetic observations or gravitational wave detection.

Alexandra participates in the MAESTRO project of the National Science Center (2018/30/A/ST9/00050) "Astrophysics of Gravitational Waves," led by Prof. Krzysztof Belczynski. You can read more about the project here.

A link to her publication on the NASA ADS website can be found here.

Research interests

• evolution of massive stars in isolated binary systems,
• population synthesis of tight systems of compact objects,
• origin of gravitational wave signals detected by LIGO/Virgo detectors.

Degrees and titles

• 2019: Master of Science in the field of Astronomy, Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw (Poland).
• 2017: Bachelor of Science in Engineering in the field of Applied Physics, Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw (Poland).

Awards / Honors

• Winner of the START scholarship (2022).
• Professor Adam Sobiczewski Prize awarded to those who conduct high-quality scientific research in mathematics, theoretical physics, or astronomy (2022).
• Scholarship of the Minister of Education and Science for outstanding young scientists (2022).

Popularization of science

• Interview for Tygodnik Interia (in Polish),
• Interview for Polskie Radio (in Polish),
• Interview for Nauka w Polsce (in Polish),
• Interview for Nature Research Highlights.