Adi Foord
University of Maryland-Baltimore County, MD·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Nearly every large galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole at its center, millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. These black holes shape their host galaxies, for example by affecting how stars form and how galactic structures develop.
- Fields
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Physics
Computer Science
- Topics
supermassive black holes
active galactic nuclei
dual AGN
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Determine how often supermassive black holes merge by using AI to identify galaxy mergers and dual active galactic nuclei (pairs of feeding black holes) in large imaging surveys, and relate these rates to gravitational wave observations.
- Investigate how supermassive black holes grew during cosmic noon, the peak era of black hole activity, and how that growth connects to accretion rates, using black hole mass and luminosity measurements.
- Map the complete history of black hole accretion with a combined optical, infrared and X-ray survey designed to catch dust-obscured black holes, using Euclid and ground-based telescope data.
- Release survey results through AGN-DB, an AI-managed database, together with the data-integration tools THALES and AGNFinder.
More about the research
They grow in two ways: by pulling in surrounding matter (accretion) or by merging with other black holes. Knowing which route dominated, and when, is key to understanding how the Universe evolved.
Why it matters
This work could show whether supermassive black holes grew mainly by feeding or by merging. That answer would inform models of how galaxies, and the star formation inside them, evolved over cosmic time. Merger rate estimates could help predict the gravitational wave events that observatories may detect. A public AGN database could also give astronomers a shared, less biased catalog of growing black holes.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Philip Hopkins
California Institute of Technology, CA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Develop new theoretical models of gas inflow onto supermassive black holes, in which strong magnetic fields dominate the accretion disk and change its behavior.
Erin Hicks
University of Alaska Anchorage, AK·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Measure the distribution and motions of molecular, ionized, and coronal gas within the central 500 parsecs of 90 nearby active galactic nuclei, using adaptive-optics near-infrared integral-field spectroscopy from Keck/OSIRIS and VLT/SINFONI.
Tamara Bogdanovic
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Model the time-dependent X-ray brightness and spectra expected from massive black hole binaries as they spiral toward merger while emitting gravitational waves.
The school
University of Maryland-Baltimore County: 7 labs on PI Pages, $151M a year on research, 90 research doctorates a year.
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