Wed, November 16, 2022, 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM EST
Elliott School of International Affairs (and online)
1957 E Street Northwest Lindner Commons (Room 602, 6th Floor) Washington, DC 20052
About the Event
Black holes are the most bizarre and extreme objects in the Universe, defying our understanding of known physical laws. Exploring this frontier has been a quest of astrophysics for decades. The Event Horizon Telescope project recently captured direct images of black holes and their environments with an Earth-sized telescope, pushing the boundaries of what is possible. This effort required breakthroughs in instruments, computer models, and global organization. Dr. Ozel will describe this journey into the unknown, sharing the path to the development of the project and the resulting scientific advances.
About the Speaker
Dr. Feryal Ozel is Chair and Professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech. Prior to this role, she was a Professor of Astronomy and Physics and Associate Dean for research at the University of Arizona. Dr. Ozel received her BS summa cum laude in physics and applied mathematics from Columbia University, her MS from the Niels Bohr Institute and her PhD from Harvard University in astrophysics in 2002. She was a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow and Member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton until 2004.
Dr. Ozel is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was elected to the Science Academy of Turkey. In recognition of her work, Dr. Ozel was awarded the Maria Goeppert Mayer award from the American Physical Society, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, a Miller Institute Visiting Professorship from UC Berkeley, and, with the EHT collaboration, the Breakthrough Prize, the Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society, a Diamond Achievement award from the National Science Foundation, and recognized with the distinction of Breakthrough of the Year by Science. She was co-chair of NASA’s Next Generation Mission Concept Study for the Lynx X-ray Observatory and has served for three years as chair of NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee. As a founding member of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, she served on the EHT Science Council since 2016 and was lead of the Modeling Working Group for three years.
