Vicky Kalogera is the co-founder and the current Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.

Kalogera received her Ptihio (B.S.) in Physics in 1992 from the University of Thessaloniki in Greece and her Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1997 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She then joined the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a CfA Postdoctoral Fellow and in 2000 she was awarded the inaugural Clay Postdoctoral Fellowship. Kalogera was appointed Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2001, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006, and was named the Erastus Otis Haven Professor of Physics and Astronomy in 2009 (until 2017).

Kalogera’s research interests lie broadly in the astrophysics of compact objects across the electromagnetic spectrum and in gravitational waves. Kalogera is a leading astrophysicist in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), LIGO being the telescopes that first detected gravitational waves in 2015. An expert in the astrophysics of black holes and neutron stars and in LIGO data analysis, Kalogera has been a member of the LSC for more than 15 years. Kalogera’s astrophysics research involves methods from applied mathematics, statistics and computer science, with extensive use of high-performance computing. In parallel to her gravitational-wave source studies, Kalogera also studies the formation and evolution of stars and their remnants detectable as gamma-ray, X-ray, and radio pulsar sources in the electromagnetic spectrum, in a wide range of stellar environments.

Kalogera was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2018. She also serves on the Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics of the National Research Council, and the Executive Board of Directors of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation (LSSTC). Among her awards and honors are the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the Hans A. Bethe Prize from the American Physical Society (APS), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering, the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award by APS, the Cottrell Scholar Award by the Research Corporation, the NSF CAREER Award in Astronomy, the A.J. Cannon Award by the American Astronomical Society (AAS), and a Fellowship in Theoretical Physics by the Simons Foundation. As a member of the discovery team of the first LIGO source (GW150914), she has been included in the 2016 Gruber Prize in Cosmology and the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. In 2010 she was elected in the Chair-line of the APS Division of Computational Physics. She has also served on the Astrophysics Subcommittee of the NASA Advisory Council Science Committee, the NASA Chandra Users Committee, and has also been an elected member of the Executive Committees of the APS Division of Astrophysics, the APS Topical Group on Gravity, and the AAS High Energy Astrophysics Division.