2026 Bullitt Lecture in Astronomy

Event Details

Summary:

For the last 8 billion years, the universe has been making fewer and fewer new stars. Galaxies that were once vibrant nurseries of star formation are increasingly becoming “red and dead.” But what causes a galaxy to stop making stars? This talk will explore the processes that fuel star formation—and those that bring it to a halt. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the most detailed clues to how and why galaxies evolve can be revealed in the light of quasars: extraordinarily bright distant objects powered by supermassive black holes. By surveying hundreds of thousands of galaxies and quasars, we can begin piecing together how gas flows have shaped the evolution of galaxies across billions of years of cosmic history.

Bio: 

Britt Lundgren is the Philip G. Carson Distinguished Professor in the Sciences and a Professor and Chair of Physics and Astronomy at the University of North Carolina Asheville. She holds a B.A. in Physics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her primary research involves pairing large ground- and space-based surveys of distant galaxies and quasars to study galaxy evolution, the intergalactic medium, and large-scale structure. 

After completing postdoctoral research at Yale University and an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she spent one year as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow in the National Science Foundation's Division of Undergraduate Education, where she helped to facilitate the interagency working group on STEM Engagement established by the National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on STEM Education. Since joining the faculty at UNC Asheville, the UNC system’s dedicated liberal arts college, Lundgren has held multiple leadership roles in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), including co-chairing the education and public outreach efforts for the SDSS-IV Collaboration.  Her work infusing SDSS data into computational undergraduate astronomy curricula led to her receipt of a Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement in 2020. 

More recently, Lundgren has broadened her scholarship, publishing on topics at the intersections of science, art, education, and policy. She is an Affiliated Fellow of Duke University's Space Diplomacy Lab, and she recently served a four-year term as an NSF appointee to the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee, which advises the NSF, NASA, the Department of Energy, and Congress on the federal astronomy and astrophysics portfolio.