Astronomy Archives - Black Hole Initiative

HARVARD.EDU

May 21 & 22, 2025

Gutman Conference Center

6 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA

RSVP

Speakers

Alex Lupsasca, Vanderbilt University

Alice Bucknell, Artist; SCI-Arc

Andrea Puhm, Universiteit van Amsterdam

Chris Smeenk, Western University

Chung-Pei Ma, UC Berkeley

Daniel Jafferis, Harvard University

Dennis Lehmkuhl, Universität Bonn

Hannah Marcus, Harvard University

Hsin-Yu Chen, University of Texas at Austin

Juan Maldacena, IAS

Matias Zaldarriaga, IAS

Matthew Dodelson, Harvard University

Nick Huggett, University of Illinois at Chicago

Raffaella Margutti, UC Berkeley

Rashid Sunyaev, Max Planck Gesellschaft

Robert Myers, Perimeter Institute

Roberto Emparan, Institut de Ciències del Cosmos, Universitat de Barcelona

Sasha Philippov, University of Maryland

Sylvia Biscoveanu, CIERA, Northwestern University

Biography

Hannah Rana is a Schmidt Science Fellow at Harvard University and Research Associate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Black Hole Initiative. She is the incoming first ever BHEX Postdoctoral Fellow. As a member of the Event Horizon Telescope and the BHEX space mission, her work focuses on black hole detection, where she works at the intersection and instrumentation for ground and space VLBI. Hannah uses GRMHD simulations to study features of the black hole photon ring to be revolved by the BHEX mission. She completed her PhD at the University of Oxford in astrophysics instrumentation, and has previously held appointments at Caltech, NASA, ESA, CERN and as a founding member of Neutron Star Systems, an electric propulsion space startup. Hanna has worked on 5 space-based astronomy missions to date.

Biography

Laurent Loinard is the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University and a member of the Black Hole Initiative (BHI). He is also a professor of astrophysics at the National University of Mexico (UNAM). He is an expert in Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), with a particular focus on VLBI astrometry. He has received a number of awards and accolades, which include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), the von Humboldt Foundation Bessel Prize (2011) and the TWAS Prize 2022. As a member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration which obtained the first image of the supermassive blackhole at the center of M87, he shared the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the 2020 Einstein Medal and the 2021 Group Award of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society.

More From Laurent

Personal website
David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS)

Our 7th Annual Conference is now available online on our youtube channel.