C. Megan Urry

Claudia Megan Urry is an American astrophysicist, who has served as the President of the American Astronomical Society, as chair of the Department of Physics at Yale University, and as part of the Hubble Space Telescope faculty. She is the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University. Urry is known for establishing the unification paradigm for radio-loud active galactic nuclei, for her research on the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies, and for her advocacy for women and underrepresented groups in science.

Early life and education After growing up in Indiana and Massachusetts, Urry attended college at Tufts University, double-majoring in mathematics and physics, and graduating summa cum laude in 1977. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and received the N. Hobbs Knight Award for Physics. She became interested in astronomy during the summer of her junior year when she interned at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Urry earned an M.S. (1979) and a Ph.D. (1984) From 2013 to 2017 she served in the Presidential line of the American Astronomical Society, from 2013-2014 as President-Elect, 2014-2016 as President, and 2016-2017 as Past President. In 2020 she was named one of the American Astronomical Society's inaugural class of fellows.

She served from 2017-2023 on the Board of Trustees of Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), the managing organization of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Urry has been active in addressing sex inequality in astronomy and science more generally, giving more than 60 talks on the topic, Reducing the prevalence of sexual harassment in astronomy was also an area of focus for Urry during the time she was President of the American Astronomical Society. In 2010 she won the Women in Space Science Award from the Adler Planetarium, and in 2015 she won the Edward A. Bouchet Leadership award from Yale University.

Research Urry has published over 330 papers in refereed journals, including one of the most highly cited review papers in astronomy, and was identified as a Highly Cited Author by Thomson Reuters. She used variability and spectral energy distribution analysis to probe the physics of relativistic jets and the demographics of blazars.

Urry and her collaborators designed major multiwavelength surveys — including the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) and Stripe 82X — to quantify black hole growth over the past 12 billion years, establishing that roughly three-quarters of all accretion onto supermassive black holes is obscured by dust. More recently, her group has developed machine learning techniques to study galaxy properties and to characterize spectral energy distributions. She also writes about science for CNN.com. Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2008 Women in Space Science Award, Adler Planetarium, 2010 George Van Biesbroeck Prize, American Astronomical Society, 2012 Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2013 Antoinette de Vaucouleurs Medal, University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Fellow, Johns Hopkins University Society of Scholars Residency, Bellagio Center, Rockefeller Foundation, 2023