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Title Associate Professor Education Postdoctoral Fellow – Space Telescope Science Institute (Baltimore, MD) 2012 – 2015 Previous Experience Dr. Meyer was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, MD, which manages the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. While at STScI, Dr. Meyer worked with the HST Proper Motions group to measure, for the first time, the superluminal motions of several nearby extragalactic jets as seen by Hubble. She also used the Very Large Array (VLA), HST, the Chandra X-ray observatory, and the Fermi gamma-ray telescope to measure the speed of jets from black holes. Professional Interests One of the major problems in astronomy today is understanding how galaxies first formed and evolved through cosmic time to produce the Universe as we see it today. We now know that most, probably all, massive galaxies have a super-massive black hole at their centers. As an observational astronomer, Dr. Meyer is interested in the general question of how the phenomena related to the growth of these black holes affect their wider environment. In particular, she is working to understand the physics and impact of the relativistic jets associated with the most massive black holes, which almost certainly have a major effect on their host galaxies and clusters throughout their lifetimes. Dr. Meyer’s group is unusually adept at using observations across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio wavelengths to TeV gamma-rays. She has won over 200 hours on flagship observatories such as the Very Large Array, ALMA, VLT, the Hubble space telescope, NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory and Fermi gamma-ray telescope, among others, and the Meyer/Georganopoulos research group has been well-supported in recent years with over $1M in funding from NASA and the NSF. Dr Meyer’s group regularly collaborates with local scientists at NASA and STScI, as well as others at top Universities around the world. Current students are working on projects ranging from extremely precise measurements of plasma motions in jets using radio interferometry, to studies of X-ray variability in jets as a diagnostic of the X-ray emission mechanism. Selected Publications More details of the group’s recent work, press releases and publications can be found at astro.umbc.edu. |
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