UCSB Astrophysics
Portrait of Tejaswi Venumadhav

§ 01People · Faculty

Tejaswi Venumadhav

Associate Professor

Tejaswi Venumadhav is a theorist who works on gravitational wave science and physical cosmology. Alongside theory, he develops scalable data analysis methods to extract new physics from observations.

For compact binary mergers he develops search pipelines, inference tools and waveform models, and he studies the population of binary black holes. With colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Study he built a new search pipeline and used it to find new binary black hole mergers in Advanced LIGO and Virgo data. His neutron star work models the tidal response and nonlinear oscillations that shift the gravitational waveform of a merging binary, and searches Fermi and Swift gamma-ray data for new magnetars in the Milky Way. He also studies strong lensing, including lensed gravitational waves. His cosmology work covers reionization, recombination, primordial magnetic fields and dark matter.

He received his PhD from Caltech and was a John Bahcall Fellow at the IAS before joining UCSB. He is a visiting professor at ICTS in Bangalore.

§ 02Fig. 1

Where in the universe

Range 5 kly to 50 kly; 100 Mly to 13.5 Gly

Tejaswi Venumadhav, row of Fig. 1. The bar spans the light travel distances of the objects studied, 5 kly to 50 kly; 100 Mly to 13.5 Gly, on a logarithmic axis from the Solar System to the cosmic microwave background. Its two colors are the two research themes. Dotted lines mark landmarks. Fig. 1 with every faculty member

§ 03Publications

Recent papers

The newest papers with Tejaswi Venumadhav as an author, from NASA ADS. Group members are in gold.

  1. 01Sep 2026arXiv
    A Coherent Search for New Galactic Magnetars using Fermi/GBM and follow-up Swift/BAT: 7 Candidates and a Large Burst CatalogA. Perera, B. Zackay, T. VenumadhavBlack holes & GWCosmic dawn
    arXiv:2609.26897
  2. 02Sep 2026arXiv
    A Multi-Mission Detection Framework for High-Energy Transients: Application to a 13-year Fermi/GBM and Swift/BAT SampleA. Perera, B. Zackay, T. VenumadhavBlack holes & GWCosmic dawn
    arXiv:2609.25672
  3. 03Sep 2026arXiv
    Probing Dark Matter with Strongly Lensed Binary Black Hole Mergers: Prospects in the Near FutureK. N. Maity, S. Jana, A. Barsode, T. Venumadhav, P. AjithBlack holes & GWCosmic dawn
    arXiv:2609.05020
  4. 04Sep 2026MNRAS
    Expanding the population of short gamma-ray transients with a coherent Fermi/GBM search: a 13-yr catalogue of short GRBsA. Perera, B. Zackay, T. VenumadhavBlack holes & GWCosmic dawn
    arXiv:2605.31554
  5. 05Sep 2026PRD
    Relativistic mode sums for neutron-star tidal responseR. Abhishek Hegade K., K. J. Kwon, T. Venumadhav, H. Yu, N. YunesBlack holes & GWCosmic dawn
    arXiv:2605.08569
  6. 06Jul 2026arXiv
    The diffraction-lensing interpretation of GW231123 with astrophysical priorsM. Ho-Yeuk Cheung, D. Wadekar, M. Zaldarriaga, T. Venumadhav, J. Roulet, A. K. MehtaBlack holes & GWCosmic dawn
    arXiv:2607.21834
  7. 07Jul 2026arXiv
    Nonlinear hydrodynamics in spinning neutron stars: Theoretical universal relations and equilibrium solutionsH. Yu, G. Nicolini, S. Y. Lau, K. J. Kwon, T. Venumadhav, N. Andersson, P. Pnigouras, F. Gittins et al. (9 authors)Black holes & GWCosmic dawn
    arXiv:2607.07943
  8. 08Jul 2026PRL
    Progenitor of the Recoiling Supermassive Black Hole RBH-1 Identified Using HST and JWST ImagingT. Islam, T. Venumadhav, D. WadekarBlack holes & GWCosmic dawn
    arXiv:2601.18986
  9. 09May 2026arXiv
    Discovery of Interpretable Surrogates via Agentic AI: Application to Gravitational WavesT. Islam, D. Wadekar, T. Venumadhav, M. Zaldarriaga, A. K. Mehta, J. Roulet, B. ZackayBlack holes & GWCosmic dawn
    arXiv:2605.11280
  10. 10May 2026PRD
    Strong lensing cosmography using binary-black-hole mergers: Prospects for the near futureK. N. Maity, S. Jana, T. Venumadhav, A. Barsode, P. AjithBlack holes & GWCosmic dawn
    arXiv:2512.15168

All papers by Tejaswi Venumadhav

§ 04Sky

Gravitational wave events

Events from Tejaswi Venumadhav's papers. Most have no point position on the sky, only a region that holds the source with 90% probability.

Everyone in the group