Professor of astrophysics at Radboud University Nijmegen and SARChI Chair in Fast Transients and Gravitational Wave astrophysics at the University of Cape Town / SAAO. Co-founder of the Department of Astrophysics at the Radboud University. From 2006-2016 chair of the department (10 faculty and 60+ scientific employees). Paul Groot received his PhD cum laude at the University of Amsterdam in 1999. For the discovery of optical afterglows to gamma-ray bursts he co-received the 2001 EU Descartes Prize. He was a CfA Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1999-2002 and spent a sabbatical at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2011. He is a member of the LIGO/Virgo team that first detected gravitational waves, and shared in the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize and the 2016 Gruber Prize. As of 2018 he is also at the University of Cape Town and the SAAO. Research: Research is focused on ultracompact binary systems, the progenitors of supernovae Type Ia, the producers of gravitational waves and the sites of transient phenomena discovered in large scale transient surveys.Co-PI on the European Galactic Plane Surveys to chart the stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Project Scientist on the X-Shooter spectrograph for the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory. Discoverer of the optical afterglows of gamma ray bursts in 1997. PI on the BlackGEM array of optical telescopes for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave bursts. Principal investigator of the MeerLICHT optical telescope: a radio-optical transient survey, in combination with the MeerKAT radio array, also in South Africa. From 2009-2014 a member of the Young Academy (DJA) of the Netherlands Royal Society of Sciences (KNAW). As of 2016 member of the Koninklijke Hollandse Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (KMHW) Personal motto: 'The sky is not the limit. It is just the start of space'