Dr. David Chester has a PhD in physics from UCLA, and a BS in Physics from MIT. His primary research focus has been in the field of scattering amplitudes and radiation for the standard model and quantum gravity, and this thesis project applied tools from scattering amplitudes to efficiently calculate gravitational radiation by utilizing Feynman diagrams. He believes he has found a link link between solutions in QCD and gravity, and has also researched aspects of non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
David became passionate about quantum field theory and general relativity while attending MIT for undergraduate studies. During his graduate studies at UCLA he worked on efficient scattering amplitude methods for Yang-Mills theory and its relation to solutions of gravity. His PhD thesis discussed how to compute gravitational radiation from Feynman diagrams. This further demonstrated that theoretical methods used for the LHC can be relevant for LIGO, two of the largest experimental endeavors. David is also interested in the application of exceptional mathematics to describe quantum gravity beyond the standard model physics.
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