Abstract
In this thesis we present two distinct projects on gravitational wave emission from blackhole binaries in the extreme-mass-ratio limit. In the first project, we studied the curious phenomenon known as "wiggles", which are essentially repeated quasi-normal-mode bursts that appear in the gravitational waveform from high-eccentricity extreme mass-ratio blackhole binaries. One mystery associated with such bursts in the context of near-extremal holes is that their frequency appears to vary over the duration of the burst. We were able to fully uncover the reason behind this behavior; it has to do with the strong excitation of quasi-normal-mode overtones and summation there of.In the second project, we have built a reduced-order surrogate model "trained" using gravitational wave data generated by a point particle black hole perturbation theory code. The benefit of reduced-order surrogate models have already been well-established for near equal mass ratios that are of interest to Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Our high-efficiency surrogate model works over a very wide range of mass-ratios -- from comparable to large mass ratios -- for black hole binary systems.