Vassiliki (Vicky) Kalogera
Northwestern University
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Primary Section: 13, Physics Secondary Section: 12, Astronomy Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2018)
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Biosketch
Vicky Kalogera is the co-founder and the current director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern. Kalogera is lead astrophysicist in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), LIGO being the telescopes that first detected gravitational waves in 2015. An expert in the astrophysics of black holes and neutron stars and in LIGO data analysis, Kalogera has been a member of the LSC for more than 15 years, and was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Research Interests
Vicky Kalogera’s research interests lie broadly in the astrophysics of compact objects across the electromagnetic spectrum and in gravitational waves. Over the years, she has worked on developing computational models for the formation and evolution of white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes in multiple stellar systems, making predictions for—and interpreting observations of—stellar explosions, gamma-ray bursts, X-ray binaries, radio pulsars, and merging binary compact objects in a wide range of stellar environments. Her group also developed the primary data analysis methods for the measurement of physical properties of gravitational-wave sources. Her group’s predictions were used in the years prior to the detection of gravitational-wave sources by laser interferometers, and her group’s data analysis work contributed to the extraction of astrophysical information and interpretation of the detections. At present, she studies stellar astrophysics broadly in the context of compact objects and transient phenomena, with an interest in large-scale survey and next-generation modeling, and multi-messenger observations. Kalogera’s astrophysics research involves methods from applied mathematics, statistics and computer science, with extensive use of high-performance computing.
