Erin Kara
Newton Lacy Pierce Prize
Erin Kara is MIT’s Class of 1958 Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics. Her research focuses on how black holes grow and affect their environments. She also works to develop new and future space missions. She co-chairs the supermassive black hole working group of the XRISM Observatory, a joint JAXA / NASA X-ray spectroscopy mission to launch in 2023, and is the Deputy Principle Investigator of the AXIS Probe Mission Concept. In 2015, she was awarded a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow, which she took to the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2018, she became the Neil Gehrels Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland, and joined the faculty of MIT as an Assistant Professor of Physics in July 2019. In 2022 the American Astronomical Society awarded her the 2022 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize, citing her “innovative and sustained contributions to high-energy astrophysics.”