What Do Black Holes Eat for Dinner?

Dr. Grant Tremblay is an Astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. He was previously a NASA Einstein Fellow at Yale University, a Fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and an Astronomer at ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. His Doctoral Thesis work was conducted at the Space Telescope Science Institute (operations center of the Hubble Space Telescope), the Johns Hopkins University, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. He currently serves as the head of the Lynx X-ray Observatory Science Support Office at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and supports Flight Operations for the Chandra X-ray Observatory as part of the High Resolution Camera Instrument Principal Investigator Team.

Dr. Tremblay’s research employs highly multiwavelength techniques, using data from the world’s most powerful ground- and space-based observatories to better understand star formation amid energetic feedback from supermassive black holes. His portfolio consists of more than seventy refereed publications and over $1.5M in NASA funding. He is also heavily involved in the development of future space missions, including instrumentation for a notional Europa Lander as well as Lynx, a NASA-funded Large Mission Concept study now under consideration by the 2020 Decadal Survey in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Dr. Tremblay is the author of two books for the general public. The first, Light from the Void: Twenty Years of Discovery with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, celebrates Chandra’s two decades of discovery and will be released by Smithsonian Books on October 22, 2019. The second, Space Made Simple, is a richly illustrated children’s book to be published by Tumblehome Learning in Spring 2019. Dr. Tremblay is also a regular main cast member on the Discovery and Science Channel’s award-winning documentary series How the Universe Works and Space’s Deepest Secrets, as well as the host of a forthcoming Science Channel miniseries on black holes.

Katie Coppens lives in Maine with her husband and two children. She is an award-winning teacher who currently teaches sixth grade science and English at Falmouth Middle School. She has a range of experience from teaching self-contained third grade to teaching high school biology and English in Tanzania. Katie’s goal is to write books that encourage kids to ask questions and have fun while learning. Katie has multiple publications, including a teacher’s guide for the National Science Teaching Association entitled Creative Writing in Science: Activities That Inspire, Geology is a Piece of Cake, Geometry is as Easy as Pie, What Do Black Holes Eat For Dinner? And Other Silly, Yet Totally Smart, Questions About Space and The Acadia Files chapter book series. Katie also writes a column for NSTA’s Science Scope magazine called “Interdisciplinary Ideas”. Go to www.katiecoppens.com or follow on Twitter @Katie_Coppens for more information on her publications.