2026 Cooper Lecture: Feryal Özel

Abstract

Taking pictures of black holes… Sizing up the densest objects in the Universe… Pushing the laws of physics to their breaking point… These may all sound like the domain of science fiction, but have been real areas of progress in astrophysics in the past decade. In this talk, I will discuss some of the fundamental questions around black holes and neutron stars and describe large-scale efforts that have led to surprising discoveries. te this, many important problems known and unknown will never be solved until we have quantum computers. I will discuss the state-of-the-art in quantum computers, led by an uneasy coalition of scientists and engineers from academia, industry and government.

Biography

Prof. Feryal Özel is an astrophysicist specializing in black holes and neutron stars. She is the Chair and Professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Physics. Özel earned her PhD from Harvard, was a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, and served as a Professor and Associate Dean at the University of Arizona until 2022. A founding member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, she led the announcement of the first image of the Milky Way’s central black hole. She chaired NASA’s Lynx X-ray Observatory study and NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee. Özel is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has received numerous honors, including the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and Oppenheimer Lectureship. With the EHT, she won the Breakthrough Prize in Physics and NSF’s Diamond Achievement Award. She also received the Rossi Prize twice, with EHT (2020) and NICER (2022). Özel serves on multiple advisory boards and has contributed to documentaries on PBS, CNN, BBC, and the History Channel.