Priya Natarajan is a professor in the departments of Astronomy and
Physics at Yale University. She received her education at M.I.T. and the
University of Cambridge, where she worked with Alan Guth and Martin
Rees, and was the first woman in Astrophysics to be elected a fellow of
Trinity College. She currently holds a Sophie and Tycho Brahe Visiting
Professorship at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and was elected
honorary professor for life at the University of Delhi. Professor
Natarajan started in astronomy as a young girl (back when Delhi still
had dark skies). She owned a small telescope that she and her father
would point at celestial objects. Her first research project involved
tracking sunspots at the Nehru Planetarium in Delhi. Her recent research
has involved cosmology, gravitational lensing, and the life histories of
black holes. Recipient of many awards and prizes (including a Guggenheim
and a Radcliffe Fellowship), she is passionate about the public
dissemination of science and frequently writes op-ed pieces for the
media.
In this talk I will draw upon the wealth of current observational data
from our own galactic backyard and beyond to offer new,tantalizing
insights into how black holes, perhaps the most enigmatic objects in the
universe, are born, feed and evolve.