Feryal Özel is a Turkish-American astrophysicist renowned for her pioneering work on neutron stars, black holes, and high-energy phenomena in extreme gravitational and magnetic environments. Born on May 27, 1975, in Istanbul, Turkey, she has risen to become a leading figure in theoretical and observational astrophysics, serving as Chair and Professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology since 2022. Her career bridges rigorous theoretical modeling with multi-wavelength observations, and she played a central role in the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration that produced the first images of black hole shadows.
Özel grew up in Istanbul in a family of physicians. She attended the Üsküdar American Academy for middle and high school, graduating in 1992. From an early age she showed strong aptitude in science and mathematics. She then moved to the United States to study at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, earning a Bachelor of Science degree summa cum laude in physics and applied mathematics in 1996. She ranked near the top of her class (salutatorian or second). After Columbia she spent a year in Europe: she worked at CERN in Geneva and completed a master’s degree in physics (focusing on particle physics, including supersymmetric decays of the Higgs boson) at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen in 1997.
She returned to the U.S. for doctoral studies at Harvard University, where she earned her Ph.D. in astrophysics in 2002 under the supervision of Ramesh Narayan. Her thesis examined the effects of strong magnetic and gravitational fields on neutron star atmospheres—an early indication of her lifelong interest in compact objects. During this period she also met her future husband, the astrophysicist Demetrios (Dimitrios) Psaltis; they married in 2001 and later had two daughters, Deniz and Selin.
Following her doctorate, Özel held a prestigious NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 2002 to around 2005. She joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 2005 as an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory. She rose through the ranks to associate professor and then full professor (2015), later serving as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Science (2021–2022). In 2022 she moved to Georgia Tech as department chair and professor of physics, continuing her research while taking on significant administrative leadership.
Özel’s scientific contributions center on the physics of neutron stars, magnetars, and black holes. She developed techniques to measure neutron star radii with high precision using X-ray observations, providing some of the tightest constraints on the equation of state of ultra-dense matter—the relationship between density and pressure deep inside these remnants of massive stars. This work helps probe nuclear physics under conditions impossible to recreate on Earth. She has also studied accretion flows onto black holes and made early theoretical predictions of the apparent sizes of nearby supermassive black hole images at different wavelengths, work that helped guide observational strategies for the EHT.
Her most publicly visible achievement came through the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of radio telescopes acting as an Earth-sized interferometer. As a founding member, Science Council participant, and lead of the Modeling and Analysis Working Group, Özel contributed theoretical models and analysis methods essential to interpreting the data. In April 2019 the collaboration released the first image of the shadow of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87. In May 2022 she helped lead the unveiling of the first image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. These images provided direct visual confirmation of predictions from general relativity and opened new avenues for testing gravity in the strong-field regime. The EHT efforts earned the collaboration the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2020), the NSF Diamond Achievement Award, and recognition as Science magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year.
Beyond research, Özel has held major leadership roles in the U.S. and international scientific communities. She chaired NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee, co-chaired the Science and Technology Definition Team for the proposed Lynx X-ray Observatory, and chaired the NASA LISA Science Implementation Study. She has also served on the NANOGrav Science Advisory Board and other panels shaping future missions and priorities in high-energy astrophysics and gravitational-wave science. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences.
Her awards reflect both individual excellence and collaborative impact. In 2013 she received the American Physical Society’s Maria Goeppert Mayer Award for outstanding contributions to neutron-star astrophysics. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), the Bart J. Bok Prize from Harvard, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Miller Visiting Professorship at UC Berkeley, and the Bruno Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society (twice—once with the EHT collaboration in 2020 and once with the NICER collaboration in 2022). Early in her career she was highlighted in lists of emerging “big thinkers.”
Özel is also an effective science communicator. She has appeared in documentaries and programs on PBS (Big Ideas), the History Channel (Universe series), CNN, BBC, and other outlets, explaining black holes, neutron stars, and the extreme universe to broad audiences. Outside academia she has competed in Olympic-distance triathlons, reflecting an active personal life balanced with family and professional demands.
Feryal Özel’s trajectory—from Istanbul classrooms to leadership of major international projects—illustrates both exceptional individual talent and the collaborative nature of modern astrophysics. By combining theoretical insight with observational constraints, she has advanced our understanding of the densest and most gravitationally extreme objects in the universe. Her ongoing work at Georgia Tech, advisory roles for future NASA missions, and continued involvement in black-hole and neutron-star science position her to influence the field for years to come. As both a researcher and a public face of astrophysics, she remains a prominent figure in efforts to image, model, and ultimately understand the most extreme environments the cosmos has to offer.