Barry Ginat grew up in Haifa, Israel. From an early age, he was fascinated with science and in particular with physics: He wanted to understand the most fundamental constituents of reality. Barry did his BSc in mathematics and physics at the Technion, in the framework of the physics honors program there. He graduated summa cum laude and first in his class, and in his second year he published his first research paper, on super-massive black holes, with Prof. Noam Soker.

He then moved to Oxford to study a Taught Master’s in theoretical and mathematical physics, as a Frost Scholar. In his a prize-winning dissertation on device-independent quantum random number generation, supervised by Prof. Artur Ekert, he investigated the concept of certified randomness.

Barry then returned to the Technion for a PhD in astrophysics, under the joint supervision of Profs. Vincent Desjacques and Hagai Perets. His is studying gravitational-wave physics and how one might use them to learn about the universe, on both astrophysical and cosmological scales. For example, his latest paper investigates the probability distribution of the stochastic gravitational-wave background, which is the cumulative effect of all gravitational radiation emitted by every pair of black holes, white dwarves or neutron stars in the cosmos. An accurate understanding of this background is crucial for the discovery of gravitational waves from physical phenomena beyond the standard model.