Vicky Kalogera

Vicky Kalogera received an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Thessaloniki in Greece and a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Following this she completed a prize postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and joined Northwestern in 2001 as a junior faculty. In 2009 she was named the E.O. Haven Professor of Physics and Astronomy; in 2017 she was selected for the first Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished University Professorship, which she still holds. Kalogera co-founded the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) in 2009, which she continues to lead as director. In 2023 Kalogera was selected to chair Northwestern’s DS/AI Steering Committee. In 2024 her multi-institutional team won a national competition and she became director of the NSF-Simons AI Institute for the Sky (NSF-Simons SkAI), a multi-institution research institute dedicated to empowering astronomers with cutting-edge AI tools to address fast-evolving challenges. Also, in 2024, Kalogera played a key role in Northwestern University joining as a founding partner of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) consortium in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Kalogera represents Northwestern on the Consortium’s Board of Directors.

Kalogera is a world expert in the astrophysics of compact objects (black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs), employing advanced computational, data science, and artificial intelligence methods. She is also a leading astrophysicist in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and was a major figure in the breakthrough detection of gravitational waves and discovery of black-hole collisions, confirming Einstein’s predictions from a hundred years earlier.

For her research, she has been recognized by numerous awards. Notably, she is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society, and a Guggenheim Fellow. For her work with the LIGO Collaboration, she has been awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2016), and the Bruno Rossi Prize by the American Astronomical Society (2017).