Degree: Ph.D.
Position: Post-Doc
Division: Astrophysics II (Warsaw)ORCID: 0000-0001-9688-3458
Office: 132
Phone: +48 223296157
Personal website: http://abbasaskar.com/
E-mail: askar@camk.edu.pl
Private e-mail: abbas.askar@gmail.com
Abbas Askar is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (CAMK) of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland.
His research focuses on black holes, the formation of compact-object binaries and gravitational-wave sources, and the dynamical evolution of dense stellar systems such as globular clusters and nuclear star clusters. He is particularly interested in converting numerical simulations of star clusters into synthetic observations that can be compared directly with astronomical data.
He is the principal investigator of the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) SONATA grant (2025–2028), “Bridging Observations and Theory: Synthetic Star Cluster Observations from Numerical Simulations.” His research group includes Dr. Renuka Pechetti and doctoral student Arthur Silva Magalhães.
From 2023 to 2025, Abbas was the principal investigator of the POLONEZ BIS 1 project, “Growing Black Holes in Star Clusters” (BHGrowth). The project was co-funded by the Polish National Science Centre and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under a Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND grant. It investigated the different pathways through which black holes can grow in dense star clusters using state-of-the-art computer simulations.
Abbas completed his PhD at CAMK in 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Mirek Giersz as a member of the MOCCA team. His doctoral research examined the dynamical evolution of stellar clusters and their populations of compact objects and exotic binary systems using Monte Carlo and direct N-body simulations. During his PhD, he also led the development of the COCOA code, which creates and analyses mock photometric observations of simulated star-cluster models.
After completing his PhD, Abbas joined Lund University in Sweden as a postdoctoral fellow supported by the Carl Trygger Foundation for Scientific Research. From 2020 to 2023, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Lund Observatory. He independently supervised two master’s and two bachelor’s student projects and contributed to teaching astronomy and astrophysics courses at both master’s and doctoral levels. He is also a core member of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) Consortium and its Astrophysics Working Group.
Main Research Interests:
