Prof. Suvi Gezari

Prof. Gezari is an Associate Professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Maryland, and founder of the Maryland Black Hole Discovery Lab.  She recently returned to the faculty at UMD after a stint as an Associate Astronomer with tenure, and Chair of the Science Staff, at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD and a Research Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University.   

She was awarded the 2023 AURA Outstanding Achievement in Science Award, and the Kavli Foundation Prize Plenary Lecture at the 235th AAS Meeting in Honolulu, HI in January 2020, and the University of Maryland College CMNS Board of Visitor’s Junior Faculty Award in 2016, was a Scialog Time Domain Astronomy Fellow in 2015, and received an NSF CAREER Award in 2015.  Prior to her faculty position she was a Hubble Fellow at Johns Hopkins University.  She received her BSc in Math-Physics, with honors at Brown University in 1999, her MA in Astronomy from UCLA in 2001, and her PhD in Astronomy from Columbia University in 2005.

Prof. Gezari’s research program harnesses the power of time domain observations to study supermassive black holes.  Prof. Gezari is a pioneer in observational studies of tidal disruption events (TDEs), luminous outbursts from the nuclei of galaxies that occur when an unlucky star is ripped apart and consumed by a central massive black hole.  She has used wide-field time domain surveys to discover TDEs, including GALEX, Pan-STARRS1, iPTF, ZTF, and soon with Rubin, Roman, ULTRASAT and UVEX.  Prof. Gezari is a NASA-selected member of the ULTRASAT Science Team, and the Science Team Lead for the Dynamic Universe for the NASA UVEX Mission.  Prof. Gezari uses follow-up observations across the electromagnetic spectrum, especially in the UV and X-rays, and spectroscopic observations of their host galaxies, to classify and characterize the events, and use them as probes of accretion physics and massive black hole demographics.