Juna Kollmeier is the Founding Director of CTAC and the Director of SDSS-V, an unprecedented panoptic spectroscopic survey that will yield optical and infrared spectra of over 6 million objects. Her research is primary focused on the emergence of structure in the universe. She combines cosmological hydrodynamic simulations and analytic theory to figure out how the tiny fluctuations in density that were present when the universe was only 300,000 years old, become the galaxies and black holes that we see now, after 14 billion years of cosmic evolution.
Kollmeier received a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (2000) and a Ph.D in astronomy from The Ohio State University (2006). She was a Hubble and Carnegie-Princeton Fellow before founding Carnegie's Theory program in 2008. She is the 2022 Solvay International Chair in Physics.