3/10/2025 Siv Schwink for Illinois Physics
“For the groundbreaking discovery of universal properties of neutron stars and for influential work on testing modified gravity theories using gravitational waves.”
Written by Siv Schwink for Illinois Physics
Illinois Physics Professor Nicolás Yunes has been elected a Fellow of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. Founded in 1971 to promote collaborative research, the society is a commissioned affiliate society of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.
Yunes’s citation reads, “For the groundbreaking discovery of universal properties of neutron stars and for influential work on testing modified gravity theories using gravitational waves.”
A full list of ISGRG Fellows by year of election is posted on the society's website here.
Yunes is a theoretical gravitational physicist. His research program in Urbana explores extreme gravity—from binary pulsars to the gravitational waves emitted by the inspiral and merger of the most compact objects in the universe, black holes and neutron stars. Using sophisticated analytical techniques and data analysis, Yunes and his team investigate gravity through Einstein’s theory of general relativity and through possible extensions to general relativity, to make observational predictions and interpret experimental data. Through these techniques, research in the Yunes group sheds new light on outstanding problems in fundamental physics—from dark matter and dark energy to the physics of quantum gravity.
Among Yunes’s most significant contributions to our understanding of the universe, he is one of the creators of the parameterized post-Einsteinian framework, which tests Einstein's theory in a model-independent way using gravitational waves. In addition, Yunes is one of the scientists who discovered the I-Love-Q and the Binary Love universal relations of neutron stars, which are used by the LIGO scientific collaboration to infer the equation of state of matter at extreme densities.
Yunes is author of 388 research papers in peer-reviewed physics journals, which collectively have been cited over 24,000 times. He is coauthor with Clifford M. Will of a popular science book on gravitational waves and testing Einstein’s theories of gravity, titled Is Einstein Still Right?. He is coauthor with M. Coleman Miller of a textbook titled Gravitational Waves in Physics and Astrophysics, relevant to nuclear physics, cosmology, astrophysics, and tests of general relativity.
At llinois, Yunes is the founding director of the Illinois Center for Advanced Studies of the Universe (ICASU), an interdisciplinary center that facilitates collaboration across disciplines on open questions in fundamental physics relating to the nature of the universe. He also serves as the PI and director of the MUSES Collaboration, a multi-institution effort to develop open-source cyberinfrastructure that will aid researchers in developing computational models and in interpreting experimental data related to outstanding questions in nuclear physics, gravitational-wave astrophysics, and heavy-ion particle physics.
Yunes served as co-chair of the Fundamental Physics Working Group of the International LISA Consortium from 2018 to 2024. He also served on the chair line of the American Physical Society’s Division of Gravitational Physics from 2018 to 2021.
Yunes is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, elected in 2022. He is the recipient of a Fox Faculty Award at Montana State University (2017) and of a General Relativity and Gravitation Young Scientist Prize of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (2015).
Yunes received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Washington University in St. Louis in 2003 and a doctorate in physics from Pennsylvania State University in 2008. He held two postdoctoral positions, as a Research Fellow at Princeton University and as a NASA Einstein Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty at Montana State University in 2011, where he cofounded the eXtreme Gravity Institute. He joined the faculty at Illinois Physics in 2019 as a full professor.