Weekly Space Hangout — May 25, 2022: Why Hello Sag A* - It's Nice to Finally See You, with Dr. Lia Medeiros

On May 12th, 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration released the first-ever direct image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Tonight we are very pleased to welcome Dr. Lia Medeiros, a member of the EHT Collaboration, to the WSH. If you watched the NSF's streaming Q&A session following their press conference, you may recognize Lia as a member of the panel.

Dr. Lia Medeiros is currently an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 2013, she completed her undergraduate education at the University of California-Berkeley in Physics and Astrophysics, and went on to earn her Masters and PhD (2019) in Physics from the University of California-Santa Barbara. After completing her classwork, Lia took advantage of the flexibility allowed by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and spent three years at the Steward Observatory at The University of Arizona and one year at the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard. Lia's PhD thesis was completed in collaboration with University of Arizona Professors Feryal Özel and Dimitrios Psaltis.

Lia was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and spent most of her childhood living in several cities in Brazil and a few years in Cambridge, England. One of the highlights of her career has been having the opportunity to engage with the scientific community in Brazil. She has given multiple talks in Brazil to both academic and public audiences in both English and Portuguese. When not simulating supermassive black holes, Lia loves horseback riding, practicing aerial silks, salsa dancing, and almost any type of art, especially ceramics and drawing.

To learn more about Lia, visit her website — you will absolutely be mesmerized by the movie on her landing page!

You can stay up to date with Lia and her research by following her on Twitter and Facebook.

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