Meg Urry

Meg Urry’s scientific research concerns the growth of supermassive black holes over the past 13 billion years and their impact on galaxy evolution. In cases where the rate of accretion onto the black hole is substantial, powerful multiwavelength emission is visible and may even outshine the host galaxy; these objects are known as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). Urry pioneered the “wedding cake” survey strategy—combining large, shallow surveys with smaller, deeper surveys—in order to sample the full AGN population across luminosity and redshift (her “Accretion History of AGN” project). Combining X-rays, infrared, and optical data sets, she and her student Ezequiel Treister established that most AGN are heavily obscured and that the fraction of obscured AGN increases with redshift. The population synthesis model developed by her student Tonima Ananna remains the only evolving luminosity function compatible with all published AGN data. Ananna, Urry, and their students have also determined the intrinsic distribution of Eddington ratios (accretion rate normalized by black hole mass) in AGN locally and at cosmic noon, which reveals how obscuration is governed by both circumnuclear geometry and temporal blowout. Urry has also worked extensively on blazars, establishing through spectral energy distributions and luminosity functions that they are a special case of AGN with relativistic jets pointed toward us. Finally, Urry has developed machine-learning methods to analyze millions of (inactive) galaxies and AGN host galaxies, providing a probe of AGN-galaxy coevolution. Urry’s work on active galaxies appears in over 400 refereed research papers, including one of the most highly cited review papers in astronomy.

Additional information: Urry is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and National Academy of Sciences, and received the Annie Jump Cannon, George van Biesbroeck, and High Energy Astrophysics Division Distinguished Career prizes from the American Astronomical Society. She also received the 2015 Edward A. Bouchet Leadership Award from Yale University and the 2010 Women in Space Science Award from the Adler Planetarium for her work to increase participation in science. She is the founding Physics instructor for the Global Teaching Project, which provides advanced courses to promising high school students in under-served areas, beginning with a pilot program in rural Mississippi. She has also written about science for CNN.com.