Eric Poisson
Eric Poisson (born July 26, 1965) is a Canadian physicist who studies black holes. He is a professor at the University of Guelph and a member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario.
Poisson was born in Montreal and grew up in Rimouski and Quebec City. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Laval University in Quebec City and his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 1991 under Werner Israel. His doctoral work introduced the idea of mass inflation in black holes, a phenomenon that helps prevent wormholes from remaining inside realistic black holes.
After his Ph.D., Poisson spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher with Kip Thorne at Caltech, studying gravitational-wave signals from black-hole systems. He then spent a year with Clifford Will at Washington University in St. Louis. His current research focuses on gravitational self-force—the effect of an object's own mass and energy on its motion in a gravitational field. This work is important for understanding how a stellar-mass black hole might orbit and merge with a supermassive black hole, which future space-based gravitational-wave detectors like LISA could observe.
Poisson was awarded the Herzberg Medal in 2005.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 19:32 (CET).