People

Biography

I have been working on the Event Horizon Telescope project that aims to take the first picture of black holes — the most extreme objects in the universe predicted by Einstein’s General Relativity.

I primarily study supermassive black holes and surrounding magnetized plasma — sites of the most energetic cosmic phenomena — through imaging at ultra-high resolutions with very long baseline interferometry (VLBI). Please visit my website for an overview of my research, CV, publications & presentations.

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Personal website

Biography

Malcolm Perry is a member of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Relativity and Gravitation research group.

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University of Cambridge

Biography

Shing-Tung Yau has made fundamental contributions to differential geometry which have influenced a wide range of scientific disciplines, including astronomy and theoretical physics. With Richard Schoen, Yau solved a longstanding question in Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity by proving that the sum of the energy in the universe is positive; their proof has provided an important tool for understanding how black holes form. In 1982 Yau was awarded the Fields Medal, the highest award in mathematics, and in 1994 he shared with Simon Donaldson of Oxford University the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Society, in recognition of his “development of nonlinear techniques in differential geometry leading to the solution of several outstanding problems.

Biography

Jonathan Weintroub is an electrical engineer and scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He leads the digital signal processing group for the Submillimeter Array (SMA), an element open-skies radio interferometer located on Maunakea in Hawaii. The SMA, used as an EHT station from the early days of the EHT, operates at frequencies of 230 GHz and above, and thus demands very wideband signal processing. Dr. Weintroub led the group which designed and deployed the “SMA Wideband Astronomical ROACH2 Machine” (SWARM) a 32 GHz bandwidth correlator and VLBI phased array, which transformed the utility of the SMA when it was commissioned as the primary facility back end in 2017. Jonathan is also the lead engineer for the EHT.

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Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Biography

Cumrun Vafa’s primary area of research is string theory.  String theory, a subject that is about four decades old, is at the center of efforts by theoretical physicists to find a unified fundamental theory of nature.  String theory provides a framework to unify everything we know about nature, including all particles and the forces between them, in a consistent quantum theory.  This is an ambitious goal, given that it aims to describe physical phenomena involving scales 1025 times smaller than the atom, as well as the cosmology of our entire universe, which involves a scale of about 1037 times bigger than the atom. In a single theory, one studies the mysteries of the confinement of quarks inside atomic nuclei, as well as the enigmatic properties of astrophysical objects such as black holes.

Such an all-encompassing theory necessarily requires a tremendous amount of mathematical technology.  In fact, most of the mathematics needed for string theory is not even yet developed.  String theorists thus have the exciting task of building new mathematics as tools to explore new laws of physics. It is therefore not surprising that string theory is at the crossroads of many fields, including mathematics, particle phenomenology, and astrophysics. Cumrun Vafa’s research has involved essentially all these aspects.  Together with his colleagues, he has worked on topological strings, trying to elucidate some new mathematics originating from string theory (notably in his work on mirror symmetry) and using these techniques to uncover some of the mysteries of black holes, particularly the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.  He has also applied these ideas to particle theories by geometrically engineering quantum field theories, as well as solving the strong coupling dynamics of confining theories (using large N matrix model technology) and geometrizing string theory defects (in a limit of string theory known as F-theory).  His recent work involves applying these ideas to come up with stringy predictions about what the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN may potentially discover in the near future.

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Department of Physics

Biography

Matthew Stanley teaches and researches the history and philosophy of science. He holds degrees in astronomy, religion, physics, and the history of science and is interested in the connections between science and the wider culture. He is the author of Einstein’s War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I (Dutton, 2019), the story of how pacifism and friendship led to a scientific revolution. He has also written Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington (Chicago 2007) and Huxley’s Church and Maxwell’s Demon (Chicago 2014), which explore the complex relationships between science and religion in history. His current project is a history of scientific predictions of the end of the world. Stanley has also worked with a nationwide National Science Foundation-funded effort to use the humanities to improve science education in the college classroom. He has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, the British Academy, and the Max Planck Institute. He currently runs the New York City History of Science Working Group. In his spare time, he co-hosts the science podcast What the If? Stanley was awarded the 2019 NYU Distinguished Teaching Award and the 2014-2015 Gallatin Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

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Personal website

Biography

Mohammadtaher Safarzadeh is a theoretical astrophysicist. His research covers an unusually broad scope, lately focusing on the nature of gravitational wave events observed with LIGO. He thinks and researches on the origin and interpretation of these mysterious events and is a the forefront of designing a new paradigm for the formation of compact binary objects in light of the recent gravitational wave events. He has worked on the nature of dark matter, the origin of unusual galaxies, early universe physics, the role of the magnetic field in shaping the observable universe, and r-process enrichment of the universe through binary neutron star mergers. He obtained his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2016. Since then, he has been a post-doctoral fellow at Arizona State University, Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and UC Santa Cruz. 

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Personal website

Biography

Laura Ruetsche’s research focuses on the foundations of physical theories, particularly quantum theories. Her book Interpreting Quantum Theories (Oxford), published in May 2011, was a co-winner of the 2013 Lakatos Award in the philosophy of science. The book aims to use peculiar features of quantum field theories to challenge entrenched accounts of what a quantum theory is and how a physical theory comes to be associated with a collection of worlds that are by its lights possible. Laura is also interested in the question of what gender (and similar sorts of social locatedness) might have to do with the epistemic dimension of scientific inquiry. Laura has held tenure-track appointments at the University of Pittsburgh and Middlebury College, visiting appointments at Cornell and Rutgers, and fellowships from the ACLS (the Charles Ryskamp fellowship) and the Center for Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences.

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Personal Website

Biography

Mark Reid is Senior Radio Astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Research interests include black holes, active galactic nuclei, galactic structure, star formation, evolved stars, astrophysical masers, and radio interferometry.

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Institute for Theory and Computation

Biography

Professor Lisa Randall studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University. Her research connects theoretical insights to puzzles in our current understanding of the properties and interactions of matter. She has developed and studied a wide variety of models to address these questions, the most prominent involving extra dimensions of space. Her work has involved improving our understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics, supersymmetry, baryogenesis, cosmological inflation, and dark matter. Randall’s research also explores ways to experimentally test and verify ideas and her current research focuses in large part on the Large Hadron Collider and dark matter searches and models.

Randall has also had a public presence through her writing, lectures, and radio and TV appearances. Randall’s books, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions and Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World were both on the New York Times’ list of 100 Notable Books of the Year. Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space was released as a Kindle Single in the summer of 2012 as an update with recent particle physics developments.

Randall’s studies have made her among the most cited and influential theoretical physicists and she has received numerous awards and honors for her scientific endeavors. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was a fellow of the American Physical Society, and is a past winner of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, a DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator Award, and the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Randall is an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the British Institute of Physics. In 2003, she received the Premio Caterina Tomassoni e Felice Pietro Chisesi Award, from the University of Rome, La Sapienza. In 2006, she received the Klopsteg Award from the American Society of Physics Teachers (AAPT) for her lectures and in 2007 she received the Julius Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society for her work on elementary particle physics and cosmology and for communicating this work to the public.

Randall has also pursued art-science connections, writing a libretto for Hypermusic: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes that premiered in the Pompidou Center in Paris and co-curating an art exhibit for the Los Angeles Arts Association, Measure for Measure, which was presented in Gallery 825 in Los Angeles, at the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, and at Harvard’s Carpenter Center. In 2012, she was the recipient of the Andrew Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics, which is given annually for significant contributions to the cultural, artistic, or humanistic dimension of physics.

Professor Randall was on the list of Time Magazine‘s “100 Most Influential People” of 2007 and was one of 40 people featured in The Rolling Stone 40th Anniversary issue that year. Prof. Randall was featured in Newsweek’s “Who’s Next in 2006” as “one of the most promising theoretical physicists of her generation” and in Seed Magazine‘s “2005 Year in Science Icons”. In 2008, Prof. Randall was among Esquire Magazine‘s “75 Most Influential People.”

Professor Randall earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University and held professorships at MIT and Princeton University before returning to Harvard in 2001. She is also the recipient of honorary degrees from Brown University, Duke University, Bard College, and the University of Antwerp.

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Department of Physics

Biography

My interest in black holes originates from my exposure to astrophysics and astronomy as a high school student (I attended an astrophysics camp on stars and galaxies, got curious about quantum mechanics and general relativity, and wrote my high school graduation thesis on the evolution of stars for which I won the First Prize from the Austrian Society of Astronomy and Astrophysics). To acquire the tools to tackle the puzzles of black hole physics I decided to become a theoretical physicist. With a Master’s degree in Physics from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria I went on to obtain my Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics at the IPhT-CEA/Saclay and Université Pierre et Marie Curie, France on the topic “Black Holes in String Theory: Guides to Quantum Gravity”. After a 3 year stint as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara I am now a postdoctoral fellow at the BHI and the Department of Physics at Harvard University. Starting in 2017 I will be a CNRS faculty member at the CPhT at Ecole Polytechnique in France.

Research Interests

The profound conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics which is most prominently exposed by the black hole information paradox has swung back and forth for nearly four decades. Black holes provide an ideal playground for attempting to unmask the secrets of quantum gravity and as such are key protagonists in my work. I am using techniques and insights from string theory, classical supergravity, holography, quantum information theory, entanglement, and decoherence to address open questions about black holes and their microstates. One aspect of my work studies the idea that the horizon of a black hole is modified by the extended objects of string theory (strings, D-branes, KK monopoles) to solve the information paradox, in particular, how such horizon-scale structure can arise from dynamical processes and what the consequences are for infalling observers. Another goal of my research is to make progress in understanding the conjectured duality between Kerr black holes and conformal field theories which could pave the way for a microscopic understanding of astrophysical black holes.

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Publications

Research Interests

Theoretical High Energy Astrophysics, General Relativity, Computational Astrophysics

Dr. Psaltis’ research focuses on the physics of neutron stars and black holes, the properties of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence in accretion flows, the testing of the theory of general relativity in the strong-field regime, and the physics responsible for the accelerating universe.

Professional Affiliations and Awards

• CAREER Award, 2008
• Academic Prize of the Bodossaki Foundation, 2005
• Harvard-Smithsonian CfA Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1997
• Jordan A. Asketh Fellowship, University of Illinois, 1997

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University of Arizona

Biography

My current research focuses on the philosophy of black holes and the philosophy of science. I am particularly interested in black hole thermodynamics and the question of how to understand and interpret black hole entropy. Other research projects of mine focus on broader aspects of black hole physics within the philosophy of science, primarily related to the existence of black holes. Do black holes exist? What methodologies are available to us to verify the existence of black holes and how do they differ from other scientific programs? I previously conducted research in the philosophy of statistical mechanics, quantum thermodynamics, and quantum information theory.

Carina Prunkl is a final year Ph.D. student at the University of Oxford working on the philosophy of black holes. She holds an MSc in Physics from Freie Universität Berlin and an MSt in Philosophy of Physics from the University of Oxford.

Biography

Dom Pesce studies the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the centers of galaxies, primarily using very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations. For the past several years, Dom has been a member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, where he works to develop techniques for modeling and imaging the horizon-scale emission from the sky’s largest SMBHs. He is also a member of the Megamaser Cosmology Project (MCP), which uses VLBI observations of water masers in orbit around SMBHs to measure distances to the objects and thereby constrain the Hubble constant.  His work modeling MCP and EHT data has led him to develop a deeper interest in VLBI as a measurement process, and some of his recent research is directed toward furthering our understanding of the nature and statistical properties of VLBI data products.

Biography

Feryal Ozel is a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. She has made pioneering contributions to the physics of neutron stars and black holes, as well as to the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies in the early Universe. Dr. Ozel made the first accurate measurements of the neutron star radii that constrain the ultradense matter equation of state.  Based on her work on accretion flows, she made the first size predictions of the images of nearby supermassive black holes at different wavelengths.

Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Dr. Ozel attended the Uskudar American Academy for middle school and high school, graduating in 1992. She received a BS summa cum laude from Columbia University and was the salutatorian of her class. Spending a year in Europe, she received a master’s degree from Niels Bohr Institute in 1997 and worked at CERN. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in astrophysics in 2002 on the effects of the intense gravitational and magnetic fields of neutron stars. Before joining the faculty at the University of Arizona, she was a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Dr. Ozel is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the Science Academy of Turkey. Ozel received the Maria Goeppert Mayer award from the American Physical Society, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, the Miller Institute Visiting Professorship from the University of California in Berkeley, and the Bart J. Bok Prize from Harvard University.

Dr. Ozel has served on a large number of advisory committees for NASA and the National Science Foundation, including the NASA Astrophysics 30-year Roadmap and the Chandra X-ray Telescope Users Committee. She frequently appears in TV documentaries on PBS, the History Channel, and CNN International as well as in many scientific articles in the popular press. She has also been a spokesperson for Louis Vuitton’s Women’s Literacy Campaign in the Middle East.

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University of Arizona

Research Interests

Philosophy, with a particular focus on its connections with physics.

My main areas of study include the foundations of quantum mechanics, the classical limit, field theory, general relativity, thermodynamics, and formal methods in mathematical physics. I am also interested in the philosophy of probability, the philosophy of time, the philosophy of mind, the history of physics, and logic.

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Personal website

Research Interests

Radio Astronomy, Supermassive Black Holes, Massive Star Formation, Active Galactic Nuclei, Extragalactic Distance Scale, Cosmic Masers.

Instrumentation:  Astronomical Detectors and Telescopes, Very Long Baseline Interferometers

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astro-ph 
Department of Astronomy

Biography

Peter Koellner joined the department in 2003 after receiving his Ph.D. from MIT. His main areas of research are mathematical logic ­- primarily set theory -­ and the philosophy of mathematics. He has teaching interests in the philosophy of physics, early analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of logic and language. He enjoys discussing a wide variety of philosophical topics.

In 2008, Professor Koellner was awarded a Kurt Gödel Centenary Research Prize Fellowship.

Research Interests

Mathematical logic, set theory, and the philosophy of mathematics

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Department of Philosophy
Logic at Harvard

Biography

Daniel Kennefick received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the National University of Ireland and his doctorate in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He was a postdoctoral researcher at Cardiff University in Wales and at Caltech before joining the faculty at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of books on the history of gravitational wave theory (Travelling at the Speed of Thought) and the 1919 Eclipse expeditions to test General Relativity (No Shadow of a Doubt) and a co-author of An Einstein Encyclopedia, all published by Princeton University Press. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is a scientific editor for the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (he has contributed to six of the published volumes).

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Personal website

Biography

David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at MIT. He is the author of several award-winning books on the history of modern physics, including Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005) and How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2011). His latest book is Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World (2020). Kaiser co-directs a research group on early-universe cosmology with Alan Guth in MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics and has also designed and helped to conduct novel experimental tests of quantum theory. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Kaiser has received MIT’s highest awards for excellence in teaching. His work has been featured in Science, Nature, the New York Times, and the New Yorker magazine. His group’s efforts to conduct a “Cosmic Bell” test of quantum entanglement were featured in a documentary film, “Einstein’s Quantum Riddle,” which premiered on US Public Television stations in 2019.

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Personal website

Biography

Michael Johnson is working to help create the first images of black holes with the Event Horizon Telescope. He is developing new EHT imaging algorithms, techniques to study the black hole’s magnetic field structure with polarimetry, and strategies to mitigate the effects of scattering in the ionized interstellar medium. 

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Personal website

Biography

I work on a range of topics in metaphysics and epistemology that overlap with the philosophy of science. (Which is to say: the best topics in metaphysics and epistemology.) Are there “fundamental” laws of nature? What are they – as distinct, say, from accidentally true generalizations, or the causal generalizations that seem to figure in the special sciences? Suppose it’s a truism that one of the central aims of scientific inquiry is to uncover the causal structure of our world (at many different time- and length-scales); what does “causal structure” need to mean, for this truism to be not merely true but illuminating? What are the varieties of probability, and can any of them be said to be properly “objective”? What would it take for one science to “reduce” to another? Must fundamental physics have an intelligible ontology – and if so, what does this constraint amount to? Is there any need for a conception of ‘metaphysical possibility’ that outstrips physical possibility? Can there be any basis for skepticism about unobservable structure that is not also, and equally, a basis for skepticism about unobserved structure? (And so on.) I firmly believe that philosophical discourse always goes better if the parties involved resolutely avoid any “burden-shifting” maneuvers, and that teaching always goes better if you bring cookies.

Research Interests

Metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science

Research Interests

High Energy Astrophysics: Studies of accretion onto compact objects (black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs). Development of detectors and telescopes for wide-field imaging surveys of black holes discovered in soft-to-hard  X-rays. Time Domain Astrophysics: X-ray/optical/IR studies of Transients and variability of black holes in binaries and galactic nuclei to probe extreme physics phenomena and constrain black hole populations. Days-to-Century optical variability studies of stars and quasars with DASCH and follow-up spectroscopy to constrain the formation and evolution of black holes.

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astro-ph

Biography

Juliusz Doboszewski has recently obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy from Jagiellonian University in Cracow for work on global spacetime properties in the context of determinism and conceptual foundations of general relativity. He is also interested in methodological issues in foundations of physics (in particular non-empirical theory assessment in quantum gravity and idealizations in black hole thermodynamics) and human enhancement.

His current research project concerns the implications of epistemological limitations in general relativity for our understanding of black holes.

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Personal website

Biography

I earned my A.B. (honors) as a double major in physics and philosophy at Harvard University, under the supervision of Profs. Hilary Putnam, Robert Nozick, and Sheldon Glashow. I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago, working with Profs. David Malament and Howard Stein in philosophy and Profs. Robert Geroch and Robert Wald in physics. During my time in Chicago, I took the full load of classes that a physics graduate student would take and spent three years with an office working as a graduate student in the Relativity Group at the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago’s Physics Department. I have held teaching and research positions at Stanford University, the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, the London School Of Economics, Trinity College (Cambridge University), and the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at the University Of Western Ontario. I am currently an assistant professor at the MCMP. I think this is all pretty good for a kid originally hailing from Dallas, Georgia, a hamlet in the deep rural American South.

I was trained both as a philosopher and as a theoretical physicist because my interests include not only issues in each discipline separately but, even more, the overlap of the two. This comes not only from the philosophical side—so much of theoretical physics today is done in the absence of constraint by experimental data that it often resembles traditional philosophy, grappling with such issues as the nature of space and time, the character of physical quantities such as the entropy of a black hole, and even the appropriate scope and foundation of the physical theory itself, being driven by conceptual analysis and Gedankenexperimente alone. My current work in these areas focuses on the intersection of general relativity, quantum field theory, and thermodynamics, primarily in the physics of black holes, early-universe singularities, and related gravitational phenomena. In general philosophy of science, I work primarily on the semantics of scientific theories, where I grouse a lot about the inadequacies of the semantic view of theories, and try to work out my own account. On the purely philosophical side, I spend a fair amount of time working on the ancient Greeks, just because I love them, and on the history of 20th-century analytic philosophy. On the purely physics side, I enjoy working on the mathematical foundations of classical mechanics and various problems in classical general relativity. Really, though, I love to think and talk about almost anything—I fervently hold with Plato that all true philosophy happens in conversation. “Brotherhood of men comes not from community of thought but from consanguinity of mind.”—Proust.

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Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität

Biography

Jeremy Butterfield is a philosopher of physics. He got his BA and Ph.D. in the Philosophy Faculty, University of Cambridge, UK; and got his first appointment there. From 1998 to 2006, he was at All Souls College, Oxford. Since 2006, he has been a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, UK. His research interests are the philosophical aspects of quantum theory, relativity theory, and classical mechanics. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Biography

Lindy Blackburn is a Radio Astronomer and EHT Data Scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He works on data statistics and calibration for the Event Horizon Telescope, with the goal of obtaining high-resolution images of supermassive black holes. Lindy obtained a Ph.D. in physics from MIT while working on the LIGO experiment, and was a NASA postdoctoral program fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center, working on searches for high-energy counterparts to gravitational-wave detections with the Fermi telescope. He has a general interest in black holes, experimental general relativity, and the application of statistical methods and modeling for precision measurement.

Research Interests

The study of gamma-ray bursts, optical transients (mainly from the Pan-STARRS project), and magnetic fields in low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. He uses observations across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio to γ-rays.

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Department of Astronomy

Biography

String theory, being our best hope for a complete description of quantum gravity and a unified theory of everything, also provides a powerful toolbox along the way for solving problems in seemingly very different subjects, such as strongly coupled quantum field theories, conformal field theory, integrable systems, algebraic geometry, hyperbolic geometry, etc. Xi Yin’s research interest lies in the fundamental aspects of string theory, and what string theory can teach us about other fields in physics and mathematics. Yin’s past works involve black holes [5], supersymmetric bound states in string theory [3,4], conformal field theory, and gauge theory in three dimensions [2]. His current research focuses on quantum gravity in low dimensions (e.g. [1]), as well as the holographic duality between gauge theory and string theory/gravity (a.k.a. AdS/CFT correspondence).

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Department of Physics