Jolien Creighton's interests are in the General Relativistic theory of gravity, with a focus on the physics of black holes and gravitational wave radiation. His scientific goal is to use gravitational radiation to observe colliding black holes (and other sources of gravitational radiation) in the distant universe.

Gravitational waves -- oscillating gravitational fields that cause the distance between neighboring points to stretch and shrink -- are expected to be propagating throughout space, but, since the force of gravity is relatively weak, these waves barely interact with matter and travel through the earth (and us) unnoticed. The strongest gravitational waves will likely come from cataclysmic events, such as the collisions of massive black holes, but even these strongest sources will only produce a miniscule effect here on the earth. A major US project to observe gravitational waves called the Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has been constructed and is now beginning to operate. The two LIGO observatories in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana, use laser interferometry to monitor the relative distances between mirrors in two orthogonal optical cavities that are four kilometers long. LIGO was designed to be able to detect a gravitational wave that produces a change of a thousandth of the size of an atomic nucleus in the distance between the mirrors at the ends of the cavities.

Creighton's goals are to use the data obtained from LIGO and other gravitational wave observatories to detect the astrophysical events that produce gravitational waves, and to use the observations to learn about the sources of the waves and the nature of strong gravity. This work involves modeling various strong sources of gravitational waves, such as black hole collisions, to obtain the expected signal, which is needed so that the astrophysical events can be discerned from the instrument noise. Observations of black hole collisions will yield important information about the black hole population in the universe and about the strong gravitational field in the vicinity of a black hole.

Jolien Creighton was an undergraduate at the University of Calgary, graduating in 1992 with a B.Sc. in Physics with a minor in Astrophysics. At the University of Calgary, Creighton studied supernova remnants and X-ray binary systems using radio and X-ray observations. He did his graduate work on the thermodynamics of black holes at the University of Waterloo, and received his Ph.D. in 1996. Creighton then worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin -- Milwaukee, where he became involved in the LIGO project and developed methods for detecting black holes using gravitational wave observations. He was appointed to the UWM faculty in 2002.