{"id":3084,"date":"2026-08-18T14:19:43","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T20:19:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/?page_id=3084"},"modified":"2026-08-18T14:19:43","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T20:19:43","slug":"colloquium-lia-medeiros","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/colloquium-lia-medeiros\/","title":{"rendered":"Colloquium \u2013 Lia Medeiros"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>Lia Medeiros, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee<\/h3>\n<h4>black hole images: what they&#8217;ve taught us so far and how we can improve them<\/h4>\n<p><strong>Abstract: <\/strong>Horizon-scale observations of accreting supermassive black holes with the Event Horizon<br \/>\nTelescope (EHT) have opened a new window onto strong-field gravity and black-hole accretion.<br \/>\nThe EHT&#8217;s 2022 observations of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the black hole at the center of our<br \/>\nGalaxy, provide a new opportunity to test the Kerr metric in a previously unexplored regime. I<br \/>\nwill discuss the EHT observations of Sgr A*, focusing on what they can reveal about<br \/>\nfundamental physics, and briefly compare these results with the earlier observations of M87*. I<br \/>\nwill then discuss how improvements in both observations and data analysis can extend these<br \/>\nmeasurements in the near future. In particular, I will introduce PRIMO, a machine-learning<br \/>\nalgorithm for EHT data analysis that uses a large library of high-fidelity simulations as a training<br \/>\nset. I will show a higher-resolution reconstruction of M87* obtained with PRIMO and<br \/>\ndemonstrate how improved image reconstruction can provide new constraints on both black-<br \/>\nhole accretion and strong-field gravity.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Bio: <\/strong>Dr. Medeiros has been an Assistant Professor at UWM since Jan 2025. Before arriving at UWM she was a NASA Hubble Fellowship Program, Einstein Fellow at Princeton University, was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) from 2019 to 2023 and was a National Science Foundation (NSF) Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow from 2019 to 2022. She completed her undergraduate education at the University of California-Berkeley in Physics and Astrophysics, class of 2013. She then received her Masters and PhD (2019) in Physics from the University of California-Santa Barbara. After completing her classes in Santa Barbara, she took advantage of the flexibility allowed by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and spent three years at the Steward Observatory at The University of Arizona and one year at the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard. Her PhD thesis was completed in collaboration with University of Arizona Professors Feryal \u00d6zel and Dimitrios Psaltis.<\/p>\n<p>September 9, 2026 @ 1:00pm (CST) in Commons Center 237<\/p>\n<p>Host: Steve Taylor<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lia Medeiros, University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee black hole images: what they&#8217;ve taught us so far and how we can improve them Abstract: Horizon-scale observations of accreting supermassive black holes with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have opened a new window onto strong-field gravity and black-hole accretion. The EHT&#8217;s 2022 observations of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*),&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"spay_email":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3084"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3084"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3087,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3084\/revisions\/3087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/physics-astronomy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}