Joseph R Farah

Dr. Joseph R. Farah is a relativistic astrophysicist and Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Miller Institute for Basic Science. His research investigates compact objects, including black holes and neutron stars, to understand strong gravity and the extreme environments left by dying massive stars. A central focus is measuring compact-object spin, which reveals information about the surrounding spacetime and the objects’ formation histories.

Farah contributed to the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration’s first images of the supermassive black holes M87 and Sagittarius A. He now leads spin-inference development for the proposed Black Hole Explorer mission, using black-hole photon rings to study spacetime geometry. His work on neutron stars combines searches through time-domain surveys with theoretical modeling of distinctive signals in supernova light curves, including those associated with newborn magnetars.

Previously a Black Hole Explorer Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, Farah earned his Ph.D. in physics at UC Santa Barbara as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. His work connects observational astronomy, theoretical astrophysics, and tests of general relativity.