About

I’m Laura Uronen — pronounced the Spanish way, but don’t worry, you don’t need to roll the r. I am a Finnish-Karelian astrophysicist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a final-year PhD student studying how we can understand binary black holes through multi-messenger lensing. For the rest of my research, you can find it on other parts of my website.

I grew up moving between different countries, taking me already from Europe to Asia — I like to joke that I can never stay in one place for too long, and it reflects in my own academic career. Languages and culture are an important part of living somewhere new, so I’ve always loved conversations about cultural differences or linguistic anomalies. That international perspective has also become part of how I approach research: I’m interested in building and contributing to the growing international community studying multi-messenger lensing, and I am active in bringing together a collaborative effort that includes researchers from the Netherlands, Belgium, UK, and Hong Kong, with the aim of building the community into a wider field. I continue to bring my expertise to the field and contribute to it by leading regular research meetings across groups involved in multi-messenger lensing.

Teaching and outreach are an essential part of my work. Bringing science both to the wider public as well as to young scientists is the key to how science is heard beyond its own limits, and making it understandable and engaging is central to this. I regularly take part in workshops and summer schools organised by our research group, including through lecturing on black hole astrophysics or by helping with guided exercises. As a teaching assistant, I won the Department of Physics Teaching Award in 2025, based on student evaluations. I’ve taken a great deal of effort to develop a student-centred pedagogical approach, and I believe this stretches across both my graduate teaching as well as my research mentoring.

In my free time, you can find me writing. I have a Substack where I sometimes post whatever weird essays I happen to think of — like one about Tolkien’s Doors of Night as black holes, or one essay I’m currently working on about how we can interpret time and Great Ones in Bloodborne through higher-dimensional physics. I like taking strange ideas and fictional cosmologies seriously.

I also play the piano, and I enjoy video games. (If the quote on my landing page was not a clue, Bloodborne is my favourite video game by far!) You are always welcome to get in touch with me, whether it is about my research, science more broadly, or even just to chat. Welcome, friend!