I arrived at Yale, the first woman ever with a tenured primary appointment in the Physics Department. Before that, I was a senior astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. Now I teach mostly undergraduate classes, and I study the growth of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies as they co-evolve over the past 13 billion years. My group collects multiwavelength data and creates models to explain it, and we have also developed the machine learning tools needed to analyze enormous surveys, including host galaxy properties and the detection of pairs of galaxies that will merge and produce gravitational waves millions of years from now. Over the past 40 years, my side hustle has been working to increase the participation of women and other outsider groups in STEM. I am also the founding physics instructor for the Global Teaching Project, which brings AP Physics instruction to under-resource high schools in Mississippi. My personal interests including staying current with news, obsessing about politics, and enjoying reading, opera, travel, Italy, cooking, knitting, conversation, and talking to students.
