Dr. Erin Kara

Biography

Erin Kara is an observational astrophysicist focused on understanding the physics of how black holes grow and affect their environments. She employs a novel technique known as X-ray reverberation mapping, which allows astronomers to map the gas falling into black holes and measure the effects of strongly curved spacetime near the event horizon. Her research encompasses a variety of transient phenomena, including tidal disruption events and Galactic black hole outbursts. Additionally, she is a NASA Participating Scientist for the XRISM Observatory, a collaborative X-ray spectroscopy mission between JAXA and NASA, and co-chairs a working group on supermassive black holes. Originally from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Kara earned her B.A. in physics with a minor in art history from Barnard College. After graduating in 2011, she moved to the United Kingdom as a Gates Cambridge Scholar to pursue her Masters and PhD at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. In 2015, she was awarded the NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship, working at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She became a Neil Gehrels Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland before joining the faculty of MIT as an Assistant Professor of Physics in July 2019.

Research Interests

Experience