Kelly Holley-Bockelmann

J. Kelly Holley-Bockelmann is an American astrophysicist who holds the position of Stevenson Professor of Physics at Vanderbilt University. She is currently the chair of NASA's Laser Interferometer Space Antenna Study Team and the chair of NASA's Astrophysics Advisory Committee. She has said she wanted to be an astronomer before she knew what an astronomer was.

Holley-Bockelmann obtained her undergraduate degree in physics from Montana State University in 1993. She completed her master's degree at the University of Michigan and obtained her PhD in astronomy from the University of Michigan in 1999.

Research and career

After earning her doctorate, Holley-Bockelmann held positions as a postdoctoral fellow at Case Western Reserve University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the Center of Gravitational Wave Physics at Pennsylvania State University. Her research during this time focused heavily on simulations of galaxies, black holes, and gravitational-wave science.

In 2017, Holley-Bockelmann was appointed the chair of NASA's study team for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency. In October 2022, she was appointed the chair of NASA's Astrophysics Advisory Committee.

Advocacy Being a first-generation college student and woman in STEM has driven Holley-Bockelmann to further efforts to improve gender and race diversity in the hard sciences.

In the field of astronomy, she is one of the principal investigators of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's Faculty and Student Teams (FAST) program, designed to remove the roadblocks that prevent students from entering astronomy and other sciences.

She has been a faculty member and mentor for the Fisk-Vanderbilt Bridge Program since 2007 and became co-director of the program in 2015. In 2022, she received the Mentor Award from the AAAS for her work with the Bridge Program.

Public engagement In 2016, Holley-Bockelmann was part of the effort to share the news of the first observation of gravitational waves with the public, presenting at TEDxNashville in May of that year.

As a member of the LISA project, Holley-Bockelmann was part of NASA's black hole week in April 2021, using the question of what black holes' collective name should be to share LISA's capability to detect primordial black holes.