2025 McDonnell Distinguished Lectures: Public Lecture with Priyamvada Natarajan on Unveiling the Invisible Universe
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is transforming our understanding of the early Universe and unveiling the formation of the first galaxies and first black holes. In this talk, Natarajan will discuss some of the recent exciting discoveries, the earlier predictions and where we are heading next.
Priyamvada Natarajan is an astrophysicist, and the inaugural Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor in Astronomy & Physics at Yale. She has made seminal contributions to our understanding of the nature of dark matter using gravitational lensing studies; and the assembly history of supermassive black holes over cosmic time. The recipient of many awards and honors, including fellowships of the American Physical Society; American Astronomical Society; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships, she was recognized with the 2022 Liberty Science Center ‘Genius Award’ and 2025 Dannie Heineman Prize in Astrophysics that is jointly awarded by the American Astronomical Society and American Institute of Physics. She was included in the TIME100 list of most influential people in the world in 2024 for her path breaking contributions to Astrophysics. Priya has served as Chair of the National Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee that advises NASA, NSF and DoE; as Chair of the Division of Astrophysics of the APS and currently serves on the Scientific Editorial Board of the AAS Journals. On the faculty at Yale, since 2000, she serves currently as the Director of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities and was the Chair of the Women Faculty Forum from 2011-2014.
Header image: Overlaid on HST image is reconstructed dark matter distribution of the cluster recovered using Lenstoolshown as a blue haze. Image Credit: NASA/Hubble, ESA, HST Frontier Fields and J. Lotz, M. Mountain, A. Koekemoer, and the HFF Team (STScI). Acknowledgement for overlaid reconstructed dark matter map for Abell 2744: Mathilde Jauzac (Durham University, UK), Jean-Paul Kneib (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland) & Priyamvada Natarajan (Yale University, USA). Image taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and WFC3 including B, V, I, Y, J, H & W filters, with a FOV that is 2.08 x 2.32 arcminutes.