Michael Pürrer is a senior research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam-Golm, Germany.

His current work is focussing on deep learning based surrogate models of gravitational waves (GW) emitted from coalescing black hole binaries. These predictive models are the crucial tools to locate and extract evidence and information about the evolution and merger of compact binaries from GW signals buried in noisy LIGO data.

Recently he has studied how inaccuracies in models of gravitational waves from compact binaries will affect our ability to correctly measure the binaries' masses and spins with LIGO, Virgo, Kagra, and EinsteinTelescope and CosmicExplorer detectors.

He has led and presented ground breaking LIGO-Virgo collaboration papers (GWTC-1 catalog of compact binary mergers, Effects of waveform model systematics on the interpretation of GW150914) on behalf of the LIGO-VIRGO Collaboration of which he has been a member since 2013. He has contributed Open source analysis code for about a dozen waveform models in LIGO’s official LSC Algorithm Library Suite while writing a substantial amount of internal analysis code.

He has performed a number of numerical relativity simulations of binary black hole mergers with spectral (SpEC) and finite difference (BAM) codes which have been key to tuning waveform models.

During his PhD at Vienna University in Austria he worked on numerical simulations of critical phenomena in gravitational collapse.