Unveiling the population of supermassive black hole binaries near merger
At the center of nearly every galaxy in the Universe lurks a supermassive black hole with mass millions to billions that of the Sun. When two galaxies collide,  their supermassive black holes sink to the center of the newly forming galaxy. There in this nascent galactic nucleus a supermassive black hole binary is formed. Supermassive binaries are the subject of a long standing mystery in astrophysics: will these monstrous black holes merge and what can that tell us about the extreme environments that shape them? I will make great strides towards solving this mystery through advancing the state of the art in simulations of interactions of supermassive black hole binaries and their gaseous environments. From these simulations I will predict binary orbital evolution rates as well as observational signatures of the interaction. I will use the former to build the most accurate binary population models to date and the latter to constrain these models via observational searches in the newest time domain data, possibly leading to the  first detections of these elusive black hole pairs.