Meg Urry is the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University, Director of the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and Chair of the Physics Department at Yale. She arrived at Yale in 2001 as the first female tenured faculty member in the history of the Yale Physics Department. Her scientific research concerns active galaxies --- i.e., galaxies with unusually luminous cores powered by very massive black holes. Her group has carried out extensive multiwavelength imaging and spectroscopy (at radio, infrared, optical, UV, X-ray, and gamma-ray wavelengths), much of it from space, in order to understand their energetics, structure, and evolution. Current interests include the mass function of black holes and the co-evolution of active and normal galaxies.
Dr. Urry received a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Mathematics summa cum laude from Tufts University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics from The Johns Hopkins University, the latter for X-ray and ultraviolet studies done at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Space Flight Center. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she moved to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which runs the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. There she became a tenured member of the senior scientific staff and headed the STScI Science Program Selection Office, which oversees the solicitation and review of Hubble Space Telescope observing proposals.
Dr. Urry won the Annie Jump Cannon award of the American Astronomical Society in 1990, and was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1998 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. She is a member of the American Astronomical Society's Committee on Public Policy, and until recently she was a member of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academy of Science's National Research Council (NRC), the NRC Space Studies Board and the NASA Space Science Advisory Committee, and she co-chaired the NRC's Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics. She has also advised NASA on Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, RXTE, ASCA, and other space observatories.
Dr. Urry has worked hard to increase the number of women and minorities in science. She organized the first national meeting on Women in Astronomy, in 1992 (www.stsci.edu/stsci/meetings/WiA/), which led to the Baltimore Charter (oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/BaltoCharter.html). As Chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society, she also organized the second meeting, at the California Institute of Technology in June 2003. She served on the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics of the American Physical Society, helped organize its Gender Equity Conference in May 2007, and led the US delegation to the first International Conference on Women in Physics, held in Paris in March 2002 (www.if.ufrgs.br/~barbosa/conference.html). She is a co-chair of the Yale Women Faculty Forum, helped represent Yale at the "9 University" meeting hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and helped organize the Yale Symposium on Women in Science in celebration of the centennial anniversary of Marie Curie's first Nobel prize. Prof. Urry was elected a Fellow of American Women in Science in 2006.
Professor Urry has been active in revising the Yale physics curriculum, implementing new interactive teaching methods and designing new courses to introduce undergraduates to current physics research. At Yale she has supervised six Yale graduate students, developed research projects for over a dozen Yale undergraduates, served as faculty advisor for another dozen undergraduates, hired seven postdocs and five faculty, and developed two large collaborative research projects with Chilean astronomers. She has increased the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics from its initial complement of two astrophysicists to a lively group of more than a dozen faculty, postdocs, students, and staff, as well as several dozen affiliated members and a steady stream of international visitors. She gives frequent public talks on astrophysics at Yale and elsewhere. She and her husband, Dr. Andrew Szymkowiak, also a Yale physicist, have two daughters, Amelia (17) and Sophia (14).
