Black Holes, Galaxies, and the Evolution of the Universe (Lecture 2021)

About The Lois McGlothlin Donaldson Endowed Lecture in Physics

Dr. Meg Urry (Virtually) at the University of Memphis 

On March 26, 2021, Yale astrophysicist Dr. Meg Urry spoke on "Black Holes, Galaxies, and the Evolution of the Universe " as the 2021 speaker for the Lois McGlothlin Donaldson Endowed Lecture in Physics at the University of Memphis. The talk was free and open to the general public,  delivered via a Zoom Webinar in accordance with the recommended practice at that time.

March 26, 2021
6:30 pm Lecture
Zoom

Biographical Information

Dr. Meg Urry is the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and from July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2013, was Chair of the Physics Department at Yale. She arrived at Yale in 2001 as the first woman with a tenured position (primary appointment) in the Yale Physics Department.Her scientific research concerns active galaxies–i.e., galaxies with unusually luminous cores powered by very massive black holes. Her group has carried out extensive multiwavelength imaging and spectroscopy (at radio, infrared, optical, UV, X-ray, and gamma-ray wavelengths), much of it from space, in order to understand their energetics, structure, and evolution. Current interests include the interplay of black hole growth and star formation as galaxies form and evolve.

Dr. Urry received a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Mathematics summa cum laude from Tufts University, as well as an Honorary Doctorate in 2009, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics and Astronomy from The Johns Hopkins University, the latter for X-ray and ultraviolet studies done at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she moved to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which runs the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. There she became a tenured member of the senior scientific staff and headed the STScI Science Program Selection Office, which oversees the solicitation and review of Hubble Space Telescope observing proposals.

In 2013 Dr. Urry was elected President of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and assumed the office in June 2014 (after a 2-year term she will finish as Past President in June 2017). Prof. Urry won the AAS’s Annie Jump Cannon prize in 1990 and George van Biesbroeck prize in 2012. She was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1998, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering in 2007, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013. She leads the American Astronomical Society’s Council and is a member of its Committee on Astronomy and Public Policy; she is a past member of the American Physical Society’s Public Policy Committee; she is past-chair of the Astronomy Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; she chaired the Science Committee on “Galaxies Across Cosmic Time” for the 2010 decadal survey in astronomy and astrophysics for the National Academy of Science’s National Research Council (NRC); she has been a member of the NRC’s Board on Physics and Astronomy and its Space Studies Board; she co-chaired the NRC’s Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics; and she has been a member of NASA’s Science Advisory Council. She has also advised NASA on Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, Hitomi (formerly Astro-H), RXTE, ASCA, and other space observatories.

Dr. Urry has worked to increase the number of women and minorities in science. She organized the first national meeting on Women in Astronomy, in 1992 (www.stsci.edu/stsci/meetings/WiA/), which led to the historic Baltimore Charter oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/BaltoCharter.html). As Chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society, she co-organized the second meeting, at the California Institute of Technology, in June 2003, and helped draft the Pasadena Recommendations that came out of that meeting; though no longer CSWA Chair, she also helped organize the third meeting, at the University of Maryland in 2009. She served on the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics of the American Physical Society; helped organize its Gender Equity Conference in May 2007; and led the US delegations to the first International Conference on Women in Physics, held in Paris in March 2002 (www.if.ufrgs.br/~barbosa/conference.html) and the 4th International Conference on Women in Physics in South Africa in April 2011. She is on the Steering Committee of Yale’s Women Faculty Forum. Prof. Urry was elected a Fellow of American Women in Science in 2006 and in 2010 was given the Women in Space Science Award from the Adler Planetarium.

Professor Urry has been active in revising the Yale physics curriculum, implementing interactive peer-learning methods in her classes and designing new courses to introduce undergraduates to current physics research. At Yale she has supervised the research of more than a dozen graduate students and several dozen Yale undergraduates, and served as faculty advisor for another few dozen undergraduates. She built the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics from its initial complement of two astrophysicists to a lively group of ~15 faculty plus postdocs, students, and staff, as well as many more affiliated members and a steady stream of international visitors. Thanks in part to her efforts, Yale is now a partner in the Keck and Palomar telescope consortia, meaning that Yale scientists have access to the world’s finest telescopes and instrument suites. She gives frequent public talks on astrophysics at Yale and elsewhere, and she writes regularly for CNN.com. She and her husband, Dr. Andrew Szymkowiak, also a Yale physicist, have two daughters, Amelia (24, Yale TD ’13, a science writer/editor for grist.org) and Sophia (22, Yale TD ’15, a budding biomedical engineer).