Category: Awards & Honors

Andrea Ghez Awarded 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for Supermassive Black Hole Discovery

Andrea Ghez (Caltech MS ’89, PhD ’92), the Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics at UCLA, has won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering research that helped reveal a supermassive black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. She shares half the Nobel Prize with Reinhard Genzel of UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. Together, Ghez and Genzel are being honored “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.”