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Meet the Researchers

Priyamvada Natarajan

Professor, Departments of Astronomy and Physics, Yale University Director, Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, Yale University

Natarajan’s research interests in black hole physics are focused on the formation, fueling and feedback from supermassive black holes over cosmic time. She develops empirically motivated simulations and models for understanding the growth and evolution of black hole populations within the larger cosmological context. Of particular interest are astrophysical processes that permit probing the deeper correlation with their host galaxies and parent dark matter halos, that drive their observed co-evolution.  A key goal is to integrate these fundamental physical processes that operate over a range of scales from sub-pc to Mpc, to probe the physics of accretion; angular momentum transfer and the alignment of spins and predict their multi-messenger observational signatures.