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: with our precise radio measurements of the orbital motion of radio pulsars in binary systems, we can carry out 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 in Taiwan in 2016.

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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