Dr. Maura McLaughlin, West Virginia University
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Abstract: The NANOGrav collaboration monitors an array of over 70 precisely timed millisecond pulsars with the Green Bank Telescope and Arecibo Observatory in order to detect perturbations due to gravitational waves at nanohertz frequencies. These gravitational waves will most likely result from an ensemble of supermassive black hole binaries. I will present the most recent upper limits on the stochastic background and individual sources, and will demonstrate that these limits are already constraining models for galaxy formation and evolution. I will then describe the dramatic gains in sensitivity that are expected from discoveries of millisecond pulsars, more sensitive instrumentation, improved detection algorithms, and international collaboration and discuss prospects for detection in the next several years.