Emily Liepold

Emily Liepold is a postdoc in the astronomy department at UC Berkeley. Her research is on black hole detection and mass measurement using stellar dynamical observations and modelling. This involves substantial observational work, primarily with the Keck Cosmic Web Imager at the Keck Observatory, as well as GMOS at Gemini, the Mitchell Spectrograph at McDonald Observatory, and the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. Emily’s work is largely computational, including among the first black hole detections and measurements with triaxial Schwarzschild orbit modelling with our re-vamped Triaxial Orbit Superposition code TriOS.

Before her life as an astronomer, Emily worked in chemical physics as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, building computational models and analytical tools to study diffusion in hetrogenous colloidal systems, transient ordered fluctuations during phase transition in two-dimensional systems, and intermolecular interactions between thiolated gold nanoparticles.

Emily grew up in North Dakota. During different phases of her life, she has been an avid runner, cyclist, and yogi. Presently, her primary hobby is forgetting to return library books on time.

She is proudly a transgender woman, a widow, and a mother to two small cats.