Andrea Ghez

Origins and early life

Andrea Mia Ghez was born in New York City on 16 June 1965, the daughter of Gilbert Ghez and Susanne Gayton, and grew up in Chicago, where her father joined the University of Chicago in 1969 and she attended its Laboratory School. Her father, of Jewish heritage, was born in Rome to a family from Tunisia and Frankfurt, and his father, a Jew of Tunisian origin, left Italy for the United States after the Fascist anti-Jewish laws of 1938.

Work and career

Her mother came from an Irish Catholic family of North Attleborough, Massachusetts, and bought her a telescope when the Moon landings made her want to become the first woman astronaut. She took her degree in physics at MIT in 1987 and her doctorate at Caltech in 1992 under Gerry Neugebauer, then joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles in 1994. With her team she began mapping the stars around Sagittarius A*, at the centre of the Milky Way, working in infrared light on the ten-metre Keck telescopes in Hawaii.

She helped pioneer adaptive optics, which corrects the blurring of the Earth's atmosphere in real time, and followed stars such as S2, which has completed a full orbit since observations began in 1995. In 1998 her work helped show that a supermassive black hole lies at the centre of our galaxy, and in 2008 her team used the stellar orbits to put its mass at about four million times that of the Sun.

Recognition

She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008 and in 2012 became the first woman to win the Crafoord Prize. In 2020 she shared one half of the Nobel Prize in Physics with Reinhard Genzel for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy, the other half going to Roger Penrose, and became the fourth woman to receive the physics prize. She holds a chair in astrophysics at UCLA and is married to Tom LaTourrette, with whom she has two sons.