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Iniyan Natarajan obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. His research interests include theory and algorithms for radio astronomy data processing and Bayesian inference. He has developed techniques for Bayesian calibration of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations. As a member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), he has developed software packages and pipelines for synthetic data generation, data calibration and image feature extraction in addition to analysing EHT data. He is also interested in instrument and atmospheric modelling for next-generation VLBI arrays.

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My current research focuses on reverse engineering near-horizon supermassive black hole observations from intercontinental baselines of radio telescopes –primarily the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)– using a methodology I call “Observing” Jet/Accretion flow/Black hole (JAB) Simulations. I lead the first EHT research group in Texas, primarily conducting research within the EHT Theory and Simulations Working Group. I also lead the EHT Outreach Group for the Americas, and have established nexuses between EHT and networks supporting diversity in the sciences such the NSBP/SAO EHT Scholars program.

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Feraz works primarily at the intersection of philosophy and science, with a particular focus on issues that arise in physics. Most recently, he has worked on questions of probability in primordial cosmology and on philosophical aspects of black hole physics.

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Katherine L. (Katie) Bouman is an assistant professor in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Electrical Engineering, and Astronomy Departments at the California Institute of Technology. Her work combines ideas from signal processing, computer vision, machine learning, and physics to find and exploit hidden signals for scientific discovery. Before joining Caltech, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She received her Ph.D. in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT in EECS, and her bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan. She is a Rosenberg Scholar, Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, recipient of the Royal Photographic Society Progress Medal, Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year Award, University of Michigan Outstanding Recent Alumni Award, and co-recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. As part of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, she is co-lead of the Imaging Working Group and acted as coordinator for papers concerning the first imaging of the M87* and Sagittarius A* black holes.

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I am a fellow at the Princeton University Gravity Initiative. From 2019-2022 I was a NASA Hubble Fellowship Program (NHFP) and Einstein Fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. I am a member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration.

I study the extreme environments just outside the event horizons of supermassive black holes, particularly in the galactic center Sgr A*  and M87. I use supercomputer simulations to study the flow of plasma as it falls into the black hole and is launched outward in relativistic jets. I also develop new approaches for testing theoretical predictions with new methods of imaging these black holes with the EHT.

I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I received a BA in Physics with a secondary concentration in Medieval studies from Carleton College in 2013, and I earned a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University in 2019. At Harvard, I worked at the Black Hole Initative; I was advised by Ramesh Narayan, Shep Doeleman and Michael Johnson.

I am a proud member of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Outlist of LGBTQIA+ members of the astronomical community.

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Dominic Chang is a graduate student in the physics department at Harvard University. He is a collaborator with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) which produced the first image of a black hole in 2019. His research interests are in High Energy and Gravitation. He is currently a student working in Michael Johnson’s group studying black hole phenomenology. Currently, Dominic is working on approximation tools for generating analytic models of black hole images on the sky.

Biography

Koushik Chatterjee completed his undergraduate degree in India and finished his Ph.D. at the University of Amsterdam in 2020. His work focuses on black hole accretion and jet propagation and he performs large-scale numerical simulations as well as algorithm and code development. His research interests lie in investigating the complex physics of astrophysical jets and disks to interpret the observed multiwavelength electromagnetic emission from black hole systems. To generate the simulations and synthetic observations, he works with the state-of-the-art GPU-accelerated GRMHD code H-AMR and the GR ray-tracing code BHOSS.

Hi, I’m Hsin-Yu Chen (陳欣榆). I came from Taiwan, and spent the first 22 years of my life in a beautiful area 木柵 , Taipei. I am an assistant professor at the Department of Physics at the UT Austin. If you’re interested in joining my group, please feel free to reach out over email.

I got my PhD from the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago, and I was a NASA Einstein-MIT Kavli Institute Fellow and a Black Hole Initiative Fellow at Harvard University.

Although I love star gazing, I have been involved with an entirely different approach to observe the Universe–detecting the gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences. My thesis research focuses on Gravitational-Wave Multi-messenger Astronomy, and I’m a member of the LIGO scientific collaboration. I also joined the Dark Energy Survey-Gravitational Wave working group to haunt for the electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational-wave signals.

Biography

I am a fourth-year Peirce Fellowship graduate student at Harvard University, working with Prof. Charlie Conroy. I have worked with Prof. Smadar Naoz, Prof. Michael Fitzgerald, and Prof. Jim Fuller (at the California Institute of Technology) throughout my undergraduate degree at UCLA. I am originally from Sydney, Australia.

I was recently a full-time Research Analyst during the first half of 2023 at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) as part of their Pre-Doctoral Program. I worked with Matteo Cantiello, Mathieu Renzo, and Jared Goldberg.

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Dr. Christian joined Fairfield’s Physics Department from the University of Arizona Tucson, where he served as the Steward Observatory Prize Fellow in Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics. He earned both his MA and PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard University, and his BA in physics and astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. A member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, Dr. Christian’s main research interests include black holes, gravitational waves, general relativity, classical mechanics, and classroom pedagogical methods.

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Connemara Doran, PhD, is Science Historian at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) in Arlington, Virginia, and holds a National Academy of Sciences – National Research Council (NAS-NRC) Research Associateship. Dr. Doran is a historian of modern science and technology, specializing in the history and philosophy of the physical and mathematical sciences, in particular on the history of astronomy and cosmology, mathematical physics, space science and technology, energy resources, environmental sciences, and climate science. Her research examines developments, from the late 19^th-century to the early 21^st-century, in theoretical and experimental physics basic research across the fields of relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, cosmology, and metrology. She has researched and published on the development of scientific instruments and space technology that enabled transformative basic research in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) cosmology (“Instrumentalizing and Visualizing the Cosmic First Light,” published in 2021); and on the creation of the hydrogen maser atomic clock and its use in testing theories of gravity in the 1976 Gravity Probe A rocket experiment carried out by NASA and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (in press).

Dr. Doran extensively researched and has published on the groundbreaking contributions of the fin-de-siècle French mathematician, engineer, physicist, and philosopher, Henri Poincaré. One article, “Poincaré’s Path to Uniformization” (published in 2018), was an invited contribution to a peer-reviewed mathematics volume. In that article, Dr. Doran explained the origins of a foundational branch of mathematics that brought together algebra, geometry, and analysis in an entirely new and transformative way in the late 19^th century. She used this historical case to explain how innovation and discovery can occur in pure mathematics, and how conceptual mathematical advance can occur as both a rupture and a continuity with previous research. This insight is not unique to pure mathematics, but also is applicable to mathematical, theoretical, and experimental physics and instrumentation. In another article, “Poincaré’s mathematical creations in search of the ‘true relations of things’” (also published in 2018), Dr. Doran analyzed how Poincaré attended to the subtle features of space and time within physics by creating subtle mathematical approaches to capturing the empirically-based “true relations” of spacetime – relations that persist regardless of the choice of spatial metric or of a change in physical theory. In this way, Poincaré created mathematical structures still used today to study gravitational and quantum phenomena and the multifold challenges of dynamical systems.

Throughout her career, Dr. Doran has worked with government agencies and academic research groups. She has completed a book manuscript on the history of U.S. energy systems in the long 20^th century, including the role of hydraulic fracturing and debates regarding peak supply and peak demand for oil. As Lecturer at Harvard University, Dr. Doran created and taught courses on the history of the physical sciences from the 17^th to the early 20^th centuries and on the history of environmental and climate science in the U.S. and globally. As a Guggenheim Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, she researched experimental aspects of NASA’s COBE and WMAP space missions: the scientific instruments created (detectors and amplifiers, microwave radiometers, cryogenic cooling technologies); the computational algorithms and statistical methods employed for data analysis and visualization production; and the dynamic interactions among scientist principal investigators, science team members, engineers, NASA administrators, university laboratories, and scientific funding agencies.
 

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Jamee Elder is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University and Affiliate of the BHI. She was formerly a BHI postdoctoral fellow (2020-2023). Before that, she was a Heinrich Hertz Fellow with the Lichtenberg Group for History and Philosophy of Physics at the University of Bonn. Elder completed her Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame.

Elder’s current research concerns the methodology and epistemology of large astrophysical experiments, especially those—including LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA and the EHT—that involve “observing” black holes. Much of her work concerns how models and simulations are embedded in experimental methods and what epistemic implications this has for making inferences about astrophysical target systems.

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Alfredo is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. His research lies at the crossroads between quantum theory and classical gravity. In particular, he is adapting novel techniques from the S-Matrix program to the study of classical solutions in general relativity such as those describing spinning black holes, a correspondence that also sheds light on the puzzle of higher-spin particles. He is currently interested in observational signatures of these classical processes, which may be measured via gravitational waves such as the ones to be detected by LIGO/LISA, but also through electromagnetic radiation. Furthermore, he is studying the asymptotic structure of spacetime and its connection to the infrared problem of quantum theory, as well as novel geometrical structures underlying scattering amplitudes in a variety of theories.

Biography

Elizabeth “Mina” Himwich is a graduate student in the Physics Department at Harvard University. Her doctoral advisor is Andy Strominger.  She is also a member of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration working on the analytic description of black hole images. Her research involves various aspects of quantum field theory, particle physics, and gravity.

Biography

Professor Aghil Alaee Khangha joined the Mathematics department at Clark University in fall 2020. Before joining Clark University, he was a Black Hole Initiative fellow at Harvard University (2019-2020); a postdoctoral fellow at the Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications at Harvard University (2018-2019); a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto (2017-2018); and a Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta (2015-2017). He received his doctorate in mathematics, with distinction, from Memorial University in December 2015.

Professor Alaee’s research focuses on geometric analysis and mathematical relativity. He investigates conjectures in general relativity — such as existence, uniqueness, and stability — and the formation of black holes using geometric analysis, which lies at the intersection of developments in differential geometry, partial differential equations, and modern physics. He has proved several geometric inequalities involving total energy, quasi-local energy, area of horizon, angular momentum, and charges of black holes.

Professor Alaee taught a variety of undergraduate mathematics courses at Clark University, Harvard University, University of Toronto, University of Alberta, and Memorial University.

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Daniel Kapec is a postdoctoral scholar at the Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA). He graduated from Yale College in 2012 with degrees in Physics and Mathematics, and received his PhD in Theoretical Physics from Harvard University in 2018. From 2018-2021, Dan was a member of the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. His research interests span a broad range of topics in quantum field theory, general relativity, string theory and quantum gravity. His recent work focuses on classical and quantum mechanical aspects of black hole physics as well as quantum gravity and holography in asymptotically flat spacetimes.

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Prashant has a Ph.D. in physics from TIFR Mumbai. He is interested in experimental tests of gravity and of the equivalence principle involving compact objects, with a recent focus on facilitating such tests using black hole imaging measurements. Older interests include gravitomagnetism and its appearance in pulsar-black hole systems, the mode stability of exotic compact objects, gravitational collapse and the cosmic censorship conjecture, and solution-generating techniques like the Newman-Janis trick.  

Biography

Martin Lesourd completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy at (Trinity) Cambridge University and (Linacre) Oxford University.  He is a mathematician whose research lies in two disciplines: general relativity and geometric analysis. Broadly speaking, his aim is to better understand a space – this could be a spacetime (which contains a black hole for instance) or a Riemannian Manifold – by studying Partial Differential Equations that can be associated with that space. With regards to general relativity, he studies both the Einstein equations and the Constraint equations, and most recently has been trying to describe the formation of black holes from a purely mathematical standpoint.

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Jue Liu comes from China, and he got a Ph.D. degree at Sun Yat-sen University in 2018. His research interests include geometric analysis and mathematical general relativity. He had deep studies in the weak cosmic censorship conjecture, one of the fundamental problems in the dynamics of black holes, and proved that the spherical naked singularities constructed by Christodoulou are unstable even under gravitational perturbations. Recently he is trying to find some physical quantity such as quasilocal mass which is useful to describe the dynamics of spacetime in particular situations. One such example is the Penrose inequality, which can indirectly verify the weak cosmic censorship conjecture from the view of spacelike hypersurfaces embedded in spacetime.

Biography

I am a theorist with training in high-energy physics and general relativity. I am broadly interested in understanding physical phenomena that arise at the experimental frontier, especially in relativistic astrophysics and gravity. I am particularly excited to make contact between theory and observation and to focus on areas where my scientific contributions can have a significant impact.

Most recently, I have delved into the emerging field of black hole imaging, in an effort to interpret the first black hole images released by the Event Horizon Telescope and to predict interesting features that will be the target of future observations, such as the black hole photon ring.

I completed my Ph.D. in Physics at Harvard University in 2017. I joined the Princeton Gravity Initiative as an Associate Research Scholar in 2020, after spending 3 years as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.

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Helen has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Logic and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to this, she completed her MA in Philosophy at Western University. She is interested in the foundations of spacetime theories and modified theories of gravity. Her dissertation work focused on modified gravitational theories that allow torsion in the spacetime. She also works on the epistemology of large-scale simulations in astrophysics/cosmology, especially in how we can increase our trust in such simulations by means of methods like code comparison.

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I am a physicist working on a broad range of topics in astrophysics. I am an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the Department of Physics & Astronomy and Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), Northwestern University. My interests are primarily in black hole physics, Milky Way’s Galactic Center Sagittarius A* and its accretion. They sometimes extend to exoplanets, star formation, and neutron stars.

My approach to astrophysics is problem oriented rather than tool oriented. This means that I apply whichever tools necessary to solve problems. I propose for telescope observations, and work with observational data, use pen and paper theory, and numerical simulations. I mostly work with data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Some of my projects involve development of new algorithms for processing interferometric data.

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Tiffany Nichols is a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow and LSST-DA Catalyst Fellow in the Departments of History and Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. She focuses on the intersection of the history of physics, astrophysics, and astronomy, environmental history, and legal history.  Nichols’s research focuses on how physicists and astronomers understand noise and disturbances originating from the natural and built environment and its effects on highly precise and sensitive instruments and research endeavors, such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). She holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and J.D. from the University of Virginia and an A.M. and Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University, where she was a graduate student member of the Black Hole Initiative, advised by Peter Galison. Nichols also has extensive experience in intellectual property litigation and related areas of law prior to her Ph.D. studies. She is currently advised by Laura Edwards, Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor in the History of American Law and Liberty and Professor of History in the Department of History and Michael Strauss, Chair of the Department of Astrophysical Sciences and Professor of Astrophysical Sciences.

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Fabio’s research focuses on “all things black holes,” from local ones to the farthest ever discovered, from the small to the supermassive ones. It includes evidence from theory, observations, and computation to construct a compelling narrative of the evolution of black holes and galaxies throughout cosmic time. His investigation revolves around black hole seeds, high-redshift quasars, formation and evolution of supermassive black holes, their coevolution with host galaxies, intermediate-mass, and wandering black holes. He also has expertise in observations, with successful proposals as PI ranging from radio to X-rays, passing through sub-mm and optical/IR, including a JWST Cycle 2 GO

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Pate seeks a fundamental description of our universe that successfully incorporates the quantum-mechanical nature of gravity. Specifically, she investigates the extent to which gravitational systems admit holographic descriptions. In such a description, the entire dynamics of a gravitational system is captured equivalently by an alternate non-gravitational system that exists in fewer dimensions. Pate currently focuses on extensions of the holographic paradigm beyond the well-studied context of negatively-curved spacetimes to asymptotically flat spacetimes, which are a formal representation of the isolated gravitational systems that appear in nature. To date, her work has uncovered an infinite number of new symmetries of gravity in the asymptotically flat context and additionally established the existence of analogues of these symmetries for any fundamental force. Beyond critically assessing the holographic paradigm, Pate will use her investigation of quantum gravity in asymptotically flat spacetimes to attack fundamental questions of physics, including “What do we predict to observe at a particle collider that probes quantum gravitational interactions?” and “Are strings, as opposed to particles, the fundamental building blocks of our universe?”.

Biography

Achilleas Porfyriadis received his B.Sc. in Physics from MIT in 2010 and his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Harvard University in 2016. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2016-2019) and at Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative (2019-2022). He joined the Department of Physics at the University of Crete as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2022. 

His research interests are in theoretical high energy and gravitational physics. Current topics include black holes, holographic dualities, and gravitational waves. The main goal of his research is to use gauge/gravity techniques to inform the study of astrophysical black holes and put holography on the astronomer’s map too. This comes at an auspicious time as LIGO/Virgo and the EHT are now observing black holes with gravitational and radio waves at a qualitatively new level of precision.

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Ana-Maria’s research revolves around asymptotic symmetries and holographic aspects of gravity in asymptotically flat space-times. Originally from Romania, she attended the University of Cambridge before completing her Ph.D. at Harvard under the supervision of Andrew Strominger. Before joining King’s College London as a Lecturer in Theoretical Physics, she was a Stephen Hawking fellow at Perimeter Institute and a Heising-Simons and Marie Curie fellow at the University of Amsterdam.

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Angelo Ricarte is a Filipino-American astrophysicist interested in the connection between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies–from the event horizon to cosmological scales. He completed his undergraduate education at the University of California at Berkeley in 2013 and his Ph.D. at Yale University in 2019. Angelo is part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration and models the polarized radiative transport behind images of EHT targets M87* and Sgr A*. On cosmological scales, Angelo studies the black hole-galaxy connection using cosmological simulations and semi-analytic/empirical models. His larger-scale interests include black hole seeding, gravitational waves, cosmic backgrounds, and wandering supermassive black holes.

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Freek Roelofs obtained his Ph.D. degree at Radboud University in the Netherlands in 2020. His general research interests include simulation and analysis of Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) data and future VLBI array concepts. He has worked on developing a synthetic data generation pipeline for the EHT, and on developing a Space VLBI mission concept aimed at obtaining ultra-high resolution images of black hole shadows. He also works on EHT time domain and model fitting analysis, and on simulated observations for the next-generation EHT.

Biography

I have lived in nine countries, travelled to over seventy, and recently moved with my husband and one-year-old son from Sweden/Pakistan to Stamford, CT, USA. It is my goal to connect people around the world by telling stories from different cultures.

I write as Shi Naseer. My first novel, The Cry of the Silkworm, is forthcoming first in the UK and Commonwealth countries in June 2024 with Atlantic Books/Allen&Unwin. It is both a coming-of-age story and a revenge story, about a grief-stricken young girl in turn-of-the-century China, and reveals the devastating consequences of the one-child policy. I am represented by Deborah Schneider of Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents.

I hold a PhD in theoretical physics from Harvard University. My thesis, Analytical Steps Towards the Observation of High-Spin Black Holes, was written under the supervision of Prof. Andy Strominger. 

Biography

I am a Junior Professor at the Universität Heidelberg. Before that I was a Bateman instructor at Caltech.

My research is in differential geometry, Teichmüller theory, and geometric structures. I am also interested in general relativity and other connections to physics.

In spring 2023, I am teaching Differential Geometry I at Heidelberg.

I am a contributor to the project Organic Materials by Geometrical Design at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies.

I am co-organizing Heidelberg’s HEGL community seminar.

Biography

Kung-Yi has a Ph.D. in physics from Caltech. Before entering Caltech, he obtained his BSc in physics from National Taiwan University. Before joining BHI, he was a postdoc at CCA and Columbia University. Kung-Yi is interested in the physics nature of active galactic nuclei (AGN) feedback and how it affects the galaxy properties and black hole accretion. His other interests include understanding how fluid microphysics and cosmological processes interplay with AGN feedback and together affect the interstellar medium and circumgalactic medium. Kung-Yi has also been exploring how an AGN feedback model should physically scale when implemented in simulations of different scales.

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Paul Tiede obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo and Perimeter Institute in 2021. He is interested in the intersection of accretion modeling and Bayesian inference. He is an active member of the Event Horizon Telescope and next-generation Event Horizon Telescope. He is interested in combining high-performance computing, Bayesian inference, and statistics to learn about accretion around black holes, jet dynamics, and the nature of gravity near the event horizon. He is an active member of the Julia programming language community and works with statisticians and software engineers to develop tools that enable precise measurements and scientific discoveries from astronomical data.

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Evita Verheijden obtained her Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Amsterdam with a dissertation titled “To the horizon and beyond: unitary evolution and non-universal dynamics of horizons in holography”. Her research focuses on aspects of quantum gravity related to the dynamics and microscopic structure of horizons: those of black holes, and the ones encountered in cosmological spacetimes. She is interested in quantum-informational aspects of black holes, such as the black hole information problem and complexity. She also works on understanding the near-horizon geometry of near-extremal black holes using lower-dimensional holography. In her free time, she plays the piano, often goes to the cinema, and likes to go (ice) swimming.

Biography

Maciek Wielgus completed a PhD on interferometric fringe pattern analysis in 2016 at Warsaw University of Technology in Poland, he has been collaborating with the N. Copernicus Astronomical Center of Polish Academy of Sciences since 2010. In 2017-2021 he worked at the Black Hole Initiative. Since 2021 he is a research scientist at Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn, Germany. Maciek works on high resolution radioastronomy with the Event Horizon Telescope project, as well as on problems related to astrophysics of black holes.

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