Dr. Krista Lynn SmithAssociate Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy Dr. John F. Kennedy of Texas A&M University has been selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Astrophysics Division to serve as a member of the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA Joint Science Team. Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) Missionplans to begin searching the universe for signs of gravitational waves within the next decade.
Smith, an observational astrophysicist who studies supermassive black holes, is one of six U.S. scientists announced. June 24th As a member of the LISA science team, he will be responsible for the scientific management of the mission and will also act as an ambassador between the agency and the scientific community.
According to NASA, Smith and other U.S. representatives will join 11 European scientists selected by ESA through an open call for applications, two interdisciplinary scientists, and a representative from the LISA Consortium on the LISA science team. The team will be co-chaired by ESA and a NASA LISA project scientist. The full team members will be announced by ESA later this summer.
The LISA mission was recently accepted into ESA’s flight program and is scheduled for launch in 2035. This ambitious space-based gravitational wave observatory will detect gravitational waves in space using lasers fired between three spacecraft more than a million miles apart, and measure how they change relative distances. During its nominal mission duration of four and a half years, LISA will observe gravitational waves in the millihertz range generated by compact binary star systems, merging supermassive black holes, and other unusual phenomena.
Smith will join the Texas A&M University faculty in fall 2023. George P. Woods and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and AstronomyShe completed her PhD in Astronomy at the University of Maryland in 2017 as a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow, then served as a three-year Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology before beginning her independent academic career in 2020 as an Assistant Professor of Physics at Southern Methodist University.
Born and raised outside Dallas, Smith first became interested in the confluence of extreme physics across all wavelength ranges in the central regions of active galaxies during her undergraduate years at the University of Texas at Austin, where she worked with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s sample of large Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and first seriously engaged in optical spectroscopy and database analysis. Her current research focuses on the behavior of energy and matter around supermassive black holes, time-domain observations of black hole accretion disks and jets, the search for binary AGN, and the impact of AGN on their host galaxies.
Smith’s research involves a variety of ground- and space-based instruments, including the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), the Swift X-ray Telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the Very Large Telescope Multi-Spectroscopic Explorer (VLT-MUSE), the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and the Very Large Array (VLA). She has received numerous grants, authored over 30 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, and given dozens of invited talks, including numerous plenary presentations. She is also actively involved in STEM mentoring and education.
Click here for details Smith and her teaching, research and service work or LISA Mission.
Shanna K. Hutchins, College of Arts and Letters, Texas A&M University
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