About Dr. Doeleman

Sheperd "Shep" Doeleman is the assistant director for the Black Hole Initiative and the Founding Director of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, which was responsible for the now famous first image of a black hole in April 2019. He was recently awarded the prestigious Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Science.

Dr. Doeleman's research focuses on studying super massive black holes with sufficient resolution to directly observe the event horizon. To do this our group assembles global networks of telescopes that observe at mm wavelengths to create an Earth-size virtual telescope using the technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). We target SgrA*, the 4 million solar mass black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and M87, a giant elliptical galaxy for this work. Both of these objects present to us the largest apparent event horizons in the Universe, and both can be resolved by (sub)mm VLBI arrays. We call this project The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).