Erin Kara – Black Hole Echoes: How We “See” Curved Spacetime
Erin Kara
MIT assistant professor, Department of Physics, member of the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
Black Hole Echoes: How We “See” Curved Spacetime
THE CLASSROOM WILL BE CLOSED FOR THIS EVENT
This lecture will be hosted as a Webinar on Zoom as well as a live stream on our YouTube channel. We encourage you to participate, ask questions, and be a part of the live meeting.
We welcome for the first time to the Westport Astronomical Society’s Online Science Lecture Series, Dr. Erin Kara – MIT assistant professor in the Department of Physics and member of the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
Professor Kara is an observational astrophysicist, working to understand the physics behind how black holes grow and affect their environments. She is an Assistant Professor at the MIT Department of Physics and the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. Her fundamental research goal is to understand how black holes form, grow and affect their environments, using a range of observational techniques to answer that question. Find out more on the Research Page. She also works to develop new and future space missions; currently she is the Deputy Principal Investigator of the AXIS Probe Mission Concept, and eagerly awaiting new data from the recently launched XRISM Observatory, for which she is a NASA Participating Scientist, and co-chair the Supermassive Black Hole working group.
Dr. Kara is originally from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and attended Barnard College of Columbia University, where she obtained a B.A. in physics with a minor in art history. After graduating in 2011, she moved to the United Kingdom on a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study for a Masters and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. In 2015, she was awarded a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow, which she took to the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2018, she became the Neil Gehrels Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland and joined the faculty of MIT as an Assistant Professor of Physics in July 2019. Recently, the American Astronomical Society awarded her the 2022 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize for ‘outstanding achievement, over the past five years, in observational astronomical research’.
