Shep Doeleman, Ph.D.

Doeleman is the founding director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, which received the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and led the international team that made the first image of a black hole. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Reed College in Oregon, he spent a year in Antarctica conducting space-science experiments, where he got hooked on conducting research in challenging circumstances. He then earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics from MIT. After serving as assistant director of MIT’s Haystack Observatory and receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012, he moved to the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and co-founded the interdisciplinary Black Hole Initiative. He has received the Lancelot M. Berkeley Prize and the Bruno Rossi Prize from the American Astronomical Society as well as the Prix Georges Lemaître. He leads the next-generation EHT (ngEHT) project working to make movies of black holes.