Eloisa tells us about her work from 2012 (and following years) constructing a model universe space-time out of lattices of blackholes.

The motivation for this is to take a very bottom up approach to cosmology. We know that around isolated objects the correct metric is close to the Schwarzschild metric, so in principle the full metric of the universe should be able to be written as a patching together of such metrics. On the other hand, the universe on large scales is statistically homogeneous and isotropic and the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric appears to fit the data well.

What Eloisa and colleagues wanted to know is how these two paradigms come together, and they more or less found the answer.

Eloisa is also employed not at a university, or any other institute we might normally expect to find a cosmologist. She is employed at IBM. However, she hasn’t stopped doing cosmology research, IBM pay her to do numerical relativity and cosmology. In the video she talks a lot about how this is possible and what IBM want from her as an employee and why this isn’t so unique. In fact, she’s not even IBM’s first numerical relativist!

Eloisa: https://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view.php?person=ibm-Eloisa.Bentivegna
1st paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.3568
2018 review article on the topic: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.01083