Cem Eröncel

What is your career trajectory to date?

My Bachelor’s degree is from Electrical Engineering, and my Master’s degree is from Physics, both in Turkey. I did my PhD at the Syracuse University in the US, where I worked on the hierarchy problem. During my PhD, I was also a visiting scientist at the Cornell University, where I worked on the gravitational wave phenomenology from neutron star mergers. After my PhD, I was a postdoctoral fellow at DESY, where I started working  on the ALP cosmology, and later at the Istanbul Technical University as a “Co-Funded Brain Circulation2 Scheme (CoCirculation2)” fellow funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Cofund program. Currently, I am a part-time lecturer at the MEF University in Istanbul.

What are the most exciting open questions in your research area?

• What can we learn about the nature of dark matter from the current and upcoming cosmological surveys such as CMB-S4, Simon’s Observatory, DESI, LSST, and JWST?
• What is the source of the stochastic gravitational wave background measured recently by the NANOGrav collaboration?

What role do you think a network like COSMIC WISPers can play in developing WISP searches in Europe?

WISP searches require close collaboration from various areas of expertise such as model building, numerical simulations, data analysis, and experimental methods. A network like COSMIC WISPers can provide a solid foundation on which such collaborations can grow.