Dr. Erin Kara

 

     Erin A. Kara is an assistant professor of physics teaching in the department of physics at MIT. Professor Kara has been teaching at MIT since July, 2019. Erin Kara earned her B.A. in physics with a minor in art history at Barnard College in NYC. After obtaining her B.A in 2011, Professor Kara traveled to the UK and obtained her master’s and a PhD at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. Fascinatingly, Professor Kara also had the opportunity to conduct a fellowship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center! Professor Kara is an accomplished physicist, obtaining the Murdin Prize for best graduate student paper at the University of Cambridge (2013), and the Postdoctoral Scientist Prize for Excellence at University of Maryland’s’ department of Astronomy. Additionally, in the short time Ms. Kara has been a professor, she has already contributed significantly to the field of astrophysics, with five different publications.  

            As an observational astrophysicist, Professor Kara’s research primarily focuses on supermassive black holes and X-ray reverberation mapping. In fact, Professor Kara herself progressed this new X-ray reverberation mapping technique. This new technique allows astronomers the ability to map the gas that falls onto black holes so they can measure how curved spacetime is affected. In her most recent research paper, “The corona contracts in a black-hole transient” (2019), Professor Kara explores X-ray observations of the transient black-hole (MAXIJ1820+070). Interestingly, the results of the paper show that the time lag reverberations between corona and the irradiated accretion disk are 6-20 times shorter than had been previously determined. 

 

References:

https://web.mit.edu/physics/people/faculty/kara_erin.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0803-x