About me

My name is Paulo César Carvalho Freire. I was born in 1970 in Lisbon, Portugal.


Me in my office at the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, in Bonn, Germany.
Photo: Aris Noutsos.


I have achieved my childhood's dream: to be an astronomer. I obtained my doctoral degree at the University of Manchester, in England, in 2001; I did my work at the Jodrell Bank site. Between 2001 and 2009 I worked at the Arecibo Observatory, in Puerto Rico. Since 2009 I have been working at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in Bonn, Germany.

My field of research is the coolest in astronomy: binary pulsars! It combines astronomy with fundamental physics, in particular high-precision tests of Einstein's general relativity and the fundamental nature of space-time and gravitational waves. It is a dream job: fun, challenging, and extremely rewarding.

I live in a small, comfortable and neat apartment that is warm and full of light, in a nice, quiet neighbourhood of Bonn called Röttgen.


My wife, Rosie Chen and I, at the time we were signing some important papers.


My favorite hobbies are reading, listening to music (although some people don't call the stuff I hear music at all), traveling, hiking, (especially in the Arctic regions), scuba diving and building geometrical models of polytopes (as seen in the top figure). The latter is a result of my general fascination with the intersection of art and science.

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