Professor Juna Kollmeier appointed as CITA’s New Director
Credit: Carnegie Institution for Science
Professor Juna Kollmeier has been appointed the next CITA Director starting July 2021. She will advance the Institute’s renowned successes and discoveries on the origin and evolution of the universe, and the many other phenomena discovered by modern astronomy.
Professor Kollmeier is on faculty and serves as the founding director of the Carnegie Theoretical Astrophysics Center at The Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, California. An observationally oriented theorist in astrophysics, director of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS-V) and a scientist committed to public outreach, Juna Kollmeier studies how structures grow and evolve in the universe, focusing on supermassive black holes, the Milky Way and the intergalactic medium.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in physics with honours from the California Institute of Technology, and a Master of Science and PhD in astronomy, both from The Ohio State University, where, in addition to her thesis work, she designed, built and deployed instrumentation parts for two telescopes as part of the Ohio State Astronomy Instrumentation Lab team.
She was named a Fulbright Scholar, was an Institute for Advanced Study Visiting Professor in 2015-16, and received Hubble and Carnegie-Princeton Fellowships. She is a CIFAR Fellow and most recently, has been selected the 2022 International Solvay Chair in Physics.