About her scientific career

She was born in 1975 in Serres, Greece and received her undergraduate degree in physics in 1992 from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

She attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where she completed her Ph.D. in astronomy in 1997. She also joined the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a CfA postdoctoral fellow (1997-2000) and was awarded the Clay Fellowship in 2000-2001.

Kalogera was appointed Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in 2001 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006, to Erastus Otis Haven Professor of Physics and Astronomy in 2009 and to Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished Professor and Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, in 2017.

She was the Co-Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), Northwestern University in 2009 and became the Director of the CIERA in 2012.

Kalogera is among the lead astrophysicists in the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration (LSC). LIGO is the world's largest gravitational wave observatory and a cutting edge physics experiment.

The discovery of gravitational waves is expected to open a new field in astronomy. Also they will contribute to a better understanding of the birth of Cosmos, since the gravitational waves existed long before the "electromagnetic radiation" was born in the Universe.

The first observation of gravitational waves was made on 14 September 2015 and was announced by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations on 11 February 2016 (Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017). The signal was named GW150914 (from "Gravitational Wave" and the date of observation 2015-09-14). The gravitational waves originated from a pair of merging black holes. On 17 August 2017, another gravitational wave signal was observed by the LIGO and Virgo detectors called GW170817. The GW was produced by two neutron stars spiralling closer to each other and finally merging.

Gravitational waves are 'ripples' in the fabric of space-time caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the Universe. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916 in his general theory of relativity.Einstein's mathematics showed that massive accelerating objects (such as neutron stars or black holes orbiting each other) would disrupt space-time in such a way that 'waves' of distorted space would radiate from the source (like the movement of waves away from a stone thrown into a pond).