Sera Markoff

Sera Markoff is a failed rockstar but successful astrophysicist, who leads a research group at the University of Amsterdam focused on the extreme physics around compact objects like black holes. She was educated in the US (BSc Physics @ MIT 1993, PhD Theoretical Astrophysics @ U Arizona 2000) before heading to Europe to work at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany as a Humboldt Fellow and then back to MIT as an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2006 she joined the faculty in Amsterdam, where she sits in both the Astronomy and Astroparticle Physics institutes as a full professor. In addition to the Humboldt and NSF Fellowships, she has won numerous prizes and awards including the two top career-stage research awards from the Dutch National Research Organization (NWO): the VIDI (2007) and VICI (2015). She was also a Tinsley Centennial Visiting Professor at UT Austin (2015) and was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2014.

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