Mapping the Universe: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Juna Kollmeier intended to be a lawyer until she went to what she calls “nerd camp” and learned how to write code to classify stars. Now she’s going further than she once thought possible, as director of the upcoming fifth phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. 

Her research is primarily focused on the emergence of structure in the universe. She uses a combination of cosmological hydrodynamic simulations and good old fashioned analytic theory to figure out how the tiny fluctuations in density that were present when the universe was only 300 thousand years old, become the galaxies and black holes that we see after 14 billion years of cosmic evolution. She considers herself an observationally-oriented theorist, in that she makes predictions that can be explicitly compared to current and future observations.