Claudia Megan Urry
Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Meg Urry is the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University, founding Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics, former Chair of the Yale Physics Department, and former President of the American Astronomical Society. She got her Ph.D. in Physics from the Johns Hopkins University and her B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from Tufts University. Her scientific research on the growth of supermassive black holes over the past 13 billion years and their co-evolution with galaxies appears in over 400 refereed research papers, including one of the most highly cited review papers in astronomy. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and National Academy of Sciences, and received the Annie Jump Cannon and George van Biesbroeck prizes from the American Astronomical Society. She also received the 2015 Edward A. Bouchet Leadership Award from Yale University and the 2010 Women in Space Science Award from the Adler Planetarium for her work to increase participation in science. She is the founding Physics instructor for the Global Teaching Project, which provides advanced courses to promising high school students in under-served areas, beginning with a pilot program in rural Mississippi. She has also written about science for CNN.com.
What do you do with Data Science?
My group uses machine learning to analyze astronomical surveys—specifically, training (separate) convolutional neural networks to measure galaxy properties and to find the precursors of merging black holes. Some papers on the galaxy work: “GaMPEN: A Machine-learning Framework for Estimating Bayesian Posteriors of Galaxy Morphological Parameters” https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2022ApJ...935..138G/abstract "Morphological Parameters and Associated Uncertainties for 8 Million Galaxies in the Hyper Suprime-Cam Wide Survey” https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023ApJ...953..134G/abstract "Automatic Machine Learning Framework to Study Morphological Parameters of AGN Host Galaxies within z < 1.4 in the Hyper Supreme-Cam Wide Survey” https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025ApJ...981....5T/abstract