Katie Bouman
Computer scientist behind the first image of a black hole
Born 1989
Photo: Credit: NSF · Public domain
«No one of us could've done it alone. It came together because of lots of different people from many different backgrounds.»
Katie Bouman is an American computer scientist who developed imaging algorithms for the Event Horizon Telescope and led one of the teams that produced the first image of a black hole, released in April 2019. The photograph of her reacting to that image made her, at 29, a global symbol of women in science.
Key achievements
- Helped produce the first image of a black hole, 2019
- Developed the CHIRP imaging algorithm in her MIT thesis
Universities
Cambridge, Massachusetts
SM 2013 and PhD 2017 in electrical engineering and computer science under William Freeman; her thesis included the CHIRP algorithm for imaging black holes.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 2017–19, on the Event Horizon Telescope imaging team.
Pasadena, California
Assistant professor from 2019 and associate professor from 2024 in computing, electrical engineering and astronomy.
Facts
- She joined the Event Horizon Telescope project as an MIT graduate student who knew almost no astronomy; her 2016 TED talk explained how to photograph a black hole three years before it was done.
- Her 2017 MIT thesis, supervised by William T. Freeman, was titled Extreme imaging via physical model inversion: seeing around corners and imaging black holes.
- The final image of the black hole in galaxy M87 was produced by four teams working independently; she has repeatedly stressed that it was the work of more than 200 scientists, not a lone genius.
- In 2022 she was part of the collaboration that imaged Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.