Featured Woman in STEM: Katie Bouman
Image from Dr. Bouman’s web page.
Dr. Katie Bouman is an associate professor at the California Institute of Technology. She is a part of the Event Horizon Telescope team that in 2019 released the first ever image of a black hole.
Early Life
Originally from West Lafayette, Indiana, Dr. Bouman participated in imaging research at Purdue University while in high school. She then received a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2011 followed by two degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an S.M. in 2013 and a Ph.D. in 2017.
The Event Horizon Telescope
The black hole in Galaxy Messier 87 as imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. Picture from NASA.gov.
Dr. Bouman started working with the Event Horizon Telescope team in 2013 and took a post-doctorate position through Harvard University in 2017. The Event Horizon Telescope is an international research project that brings together telescopes on four continents and several islands to create a ‘planet-sized’ virtual telescope capable of detecting fainter and/or more incomplete signals than a single telescope on its own. Previously, signals from black holes had not contained enough detail for researchers to pull out an image. By pooling data from across the world, the event Horizon Telescope could fill in gaps and layer images to finally see the accretion disk around a black hole. Dr. Bouman led the development of the algorithm which combined and analyzed the images from the different telescopes to detect the black hole in Galaxy Messier 87.
This image of Dr. Bouman seeing the black hole for the first time went viral, leading to both praise for her as the lone researcher and accusations of her stealing credit for the discovery. In reality, getting a picture of a black hole required international collaboration among researchers and Dr. Bouman was an essential part of that work. Picture from PBS.org.
Following the publication of that image and an image of Dr. Bouman looking at a black hole for the first time, she was wrongly described as both the sole originator of the research and taking credit for someone else’s work. As Dr. Bouman herself pointed out, while she was instrumental in designing and running the algorithm, the image of a black hole required many people working together over a number of years and with different roles.
Her Research Today
Dr. Bouman is currently a Rosenberg Scholar and associate professor at Caltech where her work focuses on computational imaging to see phenomena, like black holes, that were previously hard or impossible to image.
You can learn more about the algorithms used with the Event Horizon Telescope directly from Dr. Bouman herself in her TEDx Talk from 2017.
