and then when i learned that black holes can dilate time that's really
what sealed the deal for me and what made me very convinced that i wanted
to spend the rest of my life studying these really mysterious and fascinating objects
i'm lea medeiros i am an nsf astronomy and astrophysics postdoctoral fellow at
the institute for advanced study and for the last seven years i've been a member
of the event horizon telescope collaboration in the new sage star eht results we published
six papers and i co-led the sixth paper in that series i've also been coordinating the
gravitational physics working group within the eht for the last two and a half years
i first became interested in black holes in high school before that i was really interested in math
and actually the reason i became so interested in math as a child was that i moved around a lot and
actually lived in several different countries and i realized from a really early age that math was
universal it was the same in every country and so it seemed like a deeper more universal truth to me
even as a young child and it was in high school when i realized why math was universal
and i realized that math could be used to not only describe the universe but actually make
predictions for it and specifically when i learned about the fact that black holes dilate time that's
really what sealed the deal and what made me realize that i wanted to spend the rest of my life
trying to better understand these really fascinating and mysterious objects
the nsf support has been crucial for the completion of this project and allowed us
to use a global array of telescopes to image astrophysical black holes the first ever image
of the black hole in the center of our own galaxy allows us to test fundamental physics
in unprecedented ways together with the first detection of gravitational wave events from just
a few years ago signified the dawn of a new era of astrophysics where we can finally use
astrophysical black holes to test einstein's theory of gravity in the strong field regime
when i was in graduate school pursuing my phd i was actually in a really difficult position
at the university that i was at i couldn't find an advisor that had a project i was interested in and
had grant support to actually financially support me throughout my phd and i was actually really
strongly considering leaving the field i had already lined up an alternative non-academia job
actually and so i applied to the nsf's graduate research fellowship program and when i was awarded
that fellowship it was really life-changing for me and really is the only reason that i'm still a
scientist today that fellowship not only allowed me to continue my phd studies to get my phd
but it also gave me the flexibility and the freedom to spend most of my phd away from my main
institution and i was actually able to spend time at multiple universities working with
various different researchers specifically on the important science questions that i am most
excited about and so without this fellowship i would definitely not be a scientist today
the nsf astronomy and astrophysics postdoctoral fellowship has also allowed me to carry out a
significant outreach activity during the last semester i've been working with a classroom full
of students that are very recent refugees from guatemala so there are about 24 students most of
them are actually very recent refugees from just a few months ago and many of them have not been
able to attend school for the last year or two and so i'm teaching them astronomy trying to get
them interested in and excited about school again and what's really uh important to me
and one of the reasons that i am so passionate about this project personally is that i myself
am an immigrant from south america and i wish that as i was growing up i could have also learned
science from somebody that i could have related to on a more personal level and
i hope that this can be empowering to these students and so it's just really wonderful
to get them to engage with school again and i think it can be really powerful for them to see
a another immigrant from south america as a scientist and to actually learn
science from somebody that they can relate to on a more personal level