Panelist Biographies
Jon Miller, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Dr. Jon Miller is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor MI, where he is part of the High Energy Astrophysics
group. He received a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 2002. Miller completed an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics
Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
in 2005. His main scientific interests include accretion onto black holes
and neutron stars, jet production in these systems, and relativistic
astrophysics.
Dr. Miller is currently leading Chandra projects to explore the extreme
relativistic environments close to black holes and neutron stars, the inner
workings of accretion onto these systems, and interactions between
accretion disks and jets in supermassive black holes. Among the goals of
these projects is to measure the angular momentum or "spin" of accreting
black holes, and to understand the role of "spin" in driving jets. Miller
has worked extensively on X-ray spectroscopy, timing, and imaging of Galactic and extragalactic objects.
John Raymond, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.
John Raymond is a Physicist in the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Division at
the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He obtained a PhD from
the University of Wisconsin in 1976, and he specializes in computer
simulations of the emission spectra of hot, low density gasses. Those
simulations are used to understand the physical conditions such as density,
temperature, velocity and composition in various astrophysical objects.
Dr. Raymond has worked with X-ray and Ultraviolet observations of the solar
corona, supernova remnants and binary X-ray sources, using the physical
conditions derived from spectral studies to investigate the physical processes that heat and accelerate the plasmas in those systems.
Meg Urry, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
Meg Urry is the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale
University, and Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and
Astrophysics. Professor Urry received her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins
University in 1984 and her B.S. in Physics and Mathematics summa cum laude
from Tufts University in 1977.
Her scientific research focuses on active galaxies, which host accreting
supermassive black holes in their centers. She has published over 130
refereed articles in scientific journals, on unification, host galaxies,
relativistic jets, and the demographics of supermassive black holes. Her
current interests include the mass function of black holes and the
co-evolution of active and normal galaxies.
Prof. Urry is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of American
Women in Science, and a recipient of the Annie Jump Cannon prize of the
American Astronomical Society. She is a member of the National Research
Council's Board on Physics and Astronomy and co-chairs its Committee on
Astronomy and Astrophysics. Prior to moving to Yale in 2001, Prof. Urry was
a senior scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs the
Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. Professor Urry is also known for her efforts to increase the number of women in the physical sciences.
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