People

Biography

Peter Galison is the director of the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) at Harvard University, and the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University.  He is an interdisciplinary researcher with expertise in the fields of physics and the history/philosophy of science. He has worked extensively on the history of science, technology, and national security, and his work has been widely recognized for its contributions to the field. He is the recipient of awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Max Planck and Humboldt Stiftung Prize, the Pfizer Prize, and the Abraham Pais Prize. As a member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, he shared in the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the capture of the first image of the supermassive black hole, M87*. 

Research Interests

Professor Galison’s work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of physics–experimentation, instrumentation, and theory.

More From Peter

Personal website
Department of the History of Science
Department of Physics
Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know (2020)

Research Interests

My research focuses on studying supermassive black holes with sufficient resolution to directly observe the event horizon. To do this our group assembles global networks of telescopes that observe at mm wavelengths to create an Earth-size virtual telescope using the technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). We target SgrA*, the 4 million solar mass black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and M87, a giant elliptical galaxy for this work. Both of these objects present to us the largest apparent event horizons in the Universe and both can be resolved by (sub)mm VLBI arrays. We call this project The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

More From Shep

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard University
Department of Astronomy, “Imaging Black Holes with The Event Horizon Telescope”
Department of Astronomy

Biography

Netta Engelhardt grew up in Jerusalem, Israel, and Boston, MA. She received her BSc in physics and mathematics from Brandeis University and her Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and a member of the Princeton Gravity Initiative prior to joining the physics faculty at MIT in July 2019.

Research Interests

Netta Engelhardt’s research works towards developing an understanding of gravity on scales where quantum phenomena become important: inside black holes and near gravitational singularities such as the Big Bang. Her work has focused in part on the black hole information paradox, a puzzle in which quantum information appears to be lost in the process of black hole evaporation, a contradiction with the laws of quantum mechanics. She also works on understanding gravitational singularities within quantum gravity, most recently in the context of cosmic censorship, a conjecture that suggests that singularities that form dynamically are always hidden behind event horizons.  

Featured Research 

This Physicist Discovered an Escape From Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox

More From Netta

MIT Physics faculty website

Biography

Michael D. Johnson is a Smithsonian astrophysicist, a lecturer in the Harvard Department of Astronomy and an inaugural member of the Harvard Black Hole Initiative. He studies the most compact objects in the universe – black holes and neutron stars – through imaging at extreme resolutions with radio telescopes. Most recently, he co-led imaging efforts of the Event Horizon Telescope to produce the first picture of a black hole. He also studies pulsars, interstellar scattering, and active galactic nuclei.

More From Michael

Personal website

Biography and Research Interests

Abraham (Avi) Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University and a New York Times bestselling author. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel at age 24 (1980-1986), led the first international project supported by the Strategic Defense Initiative (1983-1988), and was subsequently a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (1988-1993). Loeb has written 9 books, including most recently, Extraterrestrial, and nearly a thousand papers on a wide range of topics, including black holes, the first stars, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the future of the Universe. Loeb is the Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (2007-present) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and also serves as the Head of the Galileo Project (2021-present). He had been the longest-serving Chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy (2011-2020) and the Founding Director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative (2016-2021). He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. Loeb is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) at the White House, a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies (2018-2021) and a current member of the Advisory Board for “Einstein: Visualize the Impossible” of the Hebrew University. He also chairs the Advisory Committee for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative (2016-present) and serves as the Science Theory Director for all Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. In 2012, TIME magazine selected Loeb as one of the 25 most influential people in space, and in 2020 Loeb was selected among the 14 most inspiring Israelis of the last decade. View Loeb’s commentaries on innovation and diversity.  

More From Avi

Personal website

Biography

Narayn is the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences in the Astronomy Department, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, Harvard University. Previously, he was on the faculty at the University of Arizona. He received a Ph.D. in Physics (1979) from Bangalore University, India.  He is a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society (London), a Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Research Interests

Narayan is a broad-spectrum theorist with a particular interest in compact objects. His research spans a range of topics in high-energy astrophysics, including both black holes and neutron stars, spanning Galactic and extragalactic objects, and electromagnetic bands from radio to gamma-rays.

Biography

With undergraduate degrees in Physics and Mathematics and graduate study in the history and philosophy of science from the Program in Science, Technology & Society at M.I.T, Natarajan completed her Ph.D. at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University where she held the Isaac Newton studentship and was a fellow of Trinity College. She is on the faculty at Yale where she holds the inaugural Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton professorship, with joint appointments in the Departments of Astronomy & Physics. Natarajan is the current Chair of the Astronomy Department and also serves as the Director of Yale’s flagship inter-disciplinary Franke Program in Science and the Humanities. Her seminal scientific contributions have been recognized with multiple awards and honors.

Research Interests

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.

Featured Research

Could primordial black holes seed supermassive black holes and account for all of dark matter?

More From Priya

Personal website
Co-evolution of black holes and their host galaxies
Primordial Black Holes and the high redshift  LCDM Universe
Prediction and Observational verification of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich imprint of quasar outflows
The Puzzle of the First Black Holes

Research Interests

Andrew Strominger works on problems in quantum gravity, string theory, general relativity and black holes. He is known for the discovery of Calabi-Yau compactification of string theory, the Strominger equations for non-Kahler geometry, the solution of the  CGHS model for 2D black hole evaporation, p-branes in string theory, their resolution of the conifold singularity, the microscopic computation of the Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy and the construction of a holographic 2D CFT dual, the black hole attractor mechanism, the SYZ conjecture for mirror symmetry, the dS/CFT correspondence, the OSV conjecture relating Donaldson-Thomas and Gromov-Witten invariants, the Kerr/CFT correspondence,  BMS invariance of gravitational scattering and its equivalence to the soft graviton theorem and the gravitational memory effect, asymptotic symmetries of QED and Yang-Mills theory, soft hair on black holes, proposed measurement of critical exponents of the photon ring via space-based extension of the Event Horizon Telescope, asymptotic w-infinity symmetries of nature and celestial holography. 

Featured Research

Photon Rings

More From Andrew

Harvard Department of Physics faculty profile
Oral History Interview
IMDB profile
Mindscape 222 | Andrew Strominger on Quantum Gravity and the Real World
The Fun is Just Beginning | Andrew Strominger | The Search for the Theory of Everything
Andy Strominger Red Carpet Interview w/ AsapSCIENCE’s Mitch + Greg: 2020 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony