Feryal Ozel

Feryal Ozel is the Chair and Professor in the School of Physics at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research in astrophysics focuses on theoretical and computational studies of the properties, formation, and environments of black holes and neutron stars. She developed new techniques to determine the properties of neutron star surfaces and interiors. She made predictions of black hole images that guided the development of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and helped constrain physics beyond General Relativity.

Ozel is a founding member of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, a former member of the EHT Science Council and lead of the Modeling Working Group. In 2022, she led the announcement of the first image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. She was co-chair of NASA’s Next Generation Large Mission Concept Study for the Lynx X-ray Observatory and has served for three years as chair of NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she was a Professor of Astronomy and Physics and the Associate Dean for Research at the University of Arizona.

Ozel is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the Science Academy of Turkey. She is the recipient of the NASA Hubble Fellowship in 2002, the Maria Goeppert Mayer award from the American Physical Society in 2013, the Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University in 2012, the Miller Institute Visiting Professorship from the University of California in Berkeley in 2014, the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016, and, with the EHT collaboration, the Diamond Achievement award from the National Science Foundation in 2019, the Breakthrough Prize in Physics in 2020, and was recognized with the distinction of Breakthrough of the Year by Science in 2020. She received the Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society twice, with the EHT collaboration in 2020 and with the NICER collaboration in 2022.