Meg Urry

Meg Urry
Meg Urry speaking at Fermilab.
Fields	Astrophysics
Institutions	Yale University
Alma mater	Tufts University Johns Hopkins University
Doctoral advisor	Art Davidsen

Claudia Megan "Meg" Urry is an American astrophysicist, who was from 2015–2016 the President of the American Astronomical Society, formerly on the Hubble space telescope faculty and was chair of the Department of Physics at Yale University 2007–2013. She is notable not only for her contributions to astronomy and astrophysics, including work on black holes and multiwavelength surveys but for her work addressing sexism and gender equity in astronomy, and science and academia more generally.

After growing up in Indiana and Massachusetts, Urry attended college at Tufts University, double-majoring in mathematics and physics, and graduating in 1977.

Urry earned an M.S. (1979) and a Ph.D. (1984) in physics from Johns Hopkins, where her advisor was Art Davidsen. For her dissertation, she studied blazars at Goddard Space Flight Center with Richard Mushotzky. She then conducted a postdoctorate at M.I.T.'s Center for Space Research, working with Claude Canizares. Urry joined Yale's faculty in 2001, at that time as the only woman in the department, and became Chair in 2007.

Urry has been active in addressing gender inequities in astronomy and science more generally, giving more than 60 talks on the topic. With Laura Danly, Urry co-organized the first meeting of Women in Astronomy.

Urry studies supermassive black holes, known as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), and the relationship of normal galaxies to AGNs.