About me

I am a fourth-year Physics Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Gravitational Physics, The University of Texas at Austin. I am interested in general and numerical relativity, and black holes (who isn’t?). Currently, my research mostly focuses on gravitational waves. This involves me generating gravitational waves using numerical relativity, assessing the accuracy of numerical and model waveforms and understanding the impact of their inaccuracy on scientific conclusions, analyzing LIGO data (from O3 and O4 so far), and developing Bayesian inference tools for LISA.  I am a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, LISA Consortium (LISA is a future space-based detector funded by NASA and ESA, here is a super cool video of what it is), and Cosmic-Explorer Consortium (future ground-based detector). If you would like to know more about my research, feel free to check out my Google Scholar. 

Apart from research, I love teaching and mentoring. I was the Assistant Instructor of the Physics lab course taught to non-physics majors at UT for almost two years. My job was to streamline the teaching for 30 other teaching assistants, who were graduate students like me while making the course more accessible for around 1000 undergrads we teach every semester. I have also mentored a high school student, undergrads for the Directed Reading Program at UT and am currently mentoring two undergrads + a research student from Spain who all are part of my research group.

Before coming to Austin, I did my masters in Physics at the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation, Rochester Institute of Technology (link to an article about my journey into Physics and my experience at RIT). I did my undergrad in Mechanical Engineering at the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka. 

In Arabic, my name is written as عاصم. I was born near Dammam, Saudi Arabia but ethnically I am a Kashmiri. If you would like to reach me, my email address is aasim.zahoor@utexas.edu and my office is at 4.232D Welch Hall, The University of Texas at Austin.