Andrew Chael receives Villum Young Investigator Grant
Andrew Chael, who joined NBIA as Louis-Hansen Foundation Assistant Professor in March 2026, has received a Villum Young Investigator grant titled "Imaging Black Holes”.
Andrew Chael was most recently an associate research scholar at the Princeton University Gravity Initiative. He previously held a NASA Einstein Fellowship at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. He received his PhD in Physics from Harvard University in 2019.
Andrew’s research focuses on understanding how strong gravity, relativistic plasma, and magnetic fields interact in extreme environments near the event horizons of supermassive black holes. By linking observations — including the first resolved images of black holes from the Event Horizon Telescope — to theory and numerical simulations, Andrew develops new methods for probing fundamental physics and measuring black hole properties from radiation emitted near the horizon. With his grant from the Villum Foundation, he will build a new interdisciplinary group to produce and interpret the next generation of black hole images.