Nationality Greek Notable award Hans Bethe Prize (2016) | Spouse Fred Rasio Institution Northwestern University | |
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Institutions Northwestern University Notable awards Hans Bethe Prize (2016) Alma mater Aristotle University of Thessaloniki | ||
Vassiliki Kalogera is a Greek astrophysicist. She is a professor at Northwestern University and the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). She is a leading member of the LIGO Collaboration that observed gravitational waves in 2015.
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Kalogera is a leading theorist in the study of gravitational waves, the emission of X-rays from compact binary objects and the coalescence of neutron-star binaries.
Early life and education
Kalogera received her undergraduate degree in physics in 1992 from the University of Thessaloniki. She attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for graduate school, where she completed her PhD in astronomy in 1997. She joined the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a CfA postdoctoral fellow and was awarded the Clay Fellowship in 2000. She joined the faculty in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University in 2001.
Awards and honors
In 2002, Kalogera won the American Astronomical Society's Annie Jump Cannon Award, which recognizes outstanding research for a postdoctoral woman researcher.
In 2008, she received the American Physical Society's Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award for her study of evolution and fate of compact binary objects.
In 2016 she was awarded the Hans Bethe Prize of the American Physical Society (APS) for her contributions to the study of the electromagnetic and gravitational wave radiation from binary compact objects.
Kalogera serves on the board of the LSST.
Career and research
Kalogera is the E.O. Haven Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University. She serves as the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). Her current research covers a range a topics in theoretical astrophysics, including the study of gravitational waves detected by LIGO, the development of models for X-ray binaries, LSST, and predicting the progenitors of supernovae.