Michael Francis Ian G.

Vega ll, PhD

He is known for his work in the field of gravitational

physics, theoretical physics. Well-known
for groundbreaking contributions to black hole physics
and gravitational waves.

BIOGRAPHY

He is a proud Bisaya who was raised in the southern city of Cagayan de Oro. Dr. Vega
was born on June 14, 1988. An associate professor and the deputy director for academic
affairs at the UP Diliman National Institute of Physics. Program Coordinator for Theoretical
Physics. He studied physics at the Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City, Metro Manila,
as an Ateneo merit scholar and DOST merit scholar, where he was mentored by mathematical
relativist Jerrold Garcia. Dr. Vega traveled to the University of Florida after temporarily teaching
at Ateneo and got a doctorate in physics with an emphasis on relativity and gravitational
physics under the guidance of Steve Detweiler. Following that, he worked as a postdoctoral
researcher under Eric Poisson at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. He worked as a
postdoctoral research associate at SISSA (the International School for Advanced Studies) in
Trieste, Italy, for three years, during which time he was also linked with Thomas Sotiriou's
group, which is currently situated at the University of Nottingham. "Traveling the world for
physics was exciting, but nothing matches working for one's hometown,” Dr. Vega says. He
started working as an associate professor at the National Institute of Physics, University of the
Philippines—Diliman, in 2016, and founded the NIP Gravity Group. In 2019, he was promoted
to professor and nominated for tenure in 2020. The Gravity Group became a founding member
of the Gravity, Astronomy, Nuclear, and Particle Physics (GANAP) Program in 2023. Professor
Ian Vega is a relativist, researcher, mentor, and family man. As the head of the Gravity Group
at the National Institute of Physics at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Vega and his
team work to better understand gravity in all its facets and seek the answers to some of the
universe’s biggest questions.

CONTRIBUTION

Study gravitational phenomena in many of its astrophysical manifestations—in black

holes, relativistic stars, gravitational waves, and the universe at large. Concerned with this
theoretical mechanism for ‘destroying’ a black hole by making it swallow a small amount of
charge and exceed its allowed limit to remain a black hole, Dr. Ian Vega talked and conducted
research about the basics of black holes, the important things we can learn from studying black
holes, addressing a toxic misconception about theoretical research, and how cosmic mysteries
can help us better understand our place in the universe.
 Dr. Vega studied slowly rotating, asymptotically flat black holes in Einstein's aether
theory and showed that solutions that are free from naked finite area singularities form a two-
parameter family. These parameters can be thought of as the mass and angular momentum of
the black hole, while there are no independent electric charges. They also show that the aether
has nonvanishing vorticity throughout spacetime, as a result of which there is no hypersurface
that resembles the universal horizon found in static, spherically symmetric solutions. Moreover,
for experimentally viable choices of the coupling constants, the frame-dragging potential of our
solutions only shows percent-level deviations from the corresponding quantities in general
relativity and Hořava gravity. Finally, we uncover and discuss several subtleties in the
correspondence between Einstein's aether theory and Hořava gravity solutions in the c ω→∞
limit.

Reference
https://ianvega.wixsite.com/ianvega/about
https://scholar.google.com/citations?
view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=Z1yv2VMAAAAJ&citation_for_view=Z1yv2VMAAAAJ:3fE2
CSJIrl8C