February 6, 2003

Packard awards fellowship to Kalogera

Vassiliki Kalogera, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, is the recipient of two awards: a 2002 David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering and the 2002 Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy from the American Association of Univer-sity Women and the American Astronomical Society.

Kalogera is one of 20 scholars nationally to receive the five-year, $625,000 Packard fellowship, whose purpose is to “encourage the nation’s most promising young university professors to pursue their science and engineering research with few funding restrictions.” The Cannon award is given annually to a woman for “distinguished contributions to astronomy or for similar contributions in related sciences which have immediate applications to astronomy.”

Kalogera is studying X-ray binary populations in nearby galaxies, a theoretical study of X-ray binary formation and evolution in different galactic environments. She also works on problems related to compact objects as gravitational-wave sources and their anticipated detection in the coming decade.

Kalogera came to North-western from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory where she was a Clay Fellow. She also held a Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship there from 1997 to 2001. She earned her doctorate in astronomy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her undergraduate degree in physics from the University Thessaloniki in Greece.

The National Science Foundation is supporting Kalogera’s work on sources for ground-based observatories, and her work on such sources for future space observatories and on X-ray binaries detected by the Chandra telescope are supported by NASA.