The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

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Grant Tremblay

Center for Astrophysics

External Relations Lead & Astrophysicist

Grant Tremblay

grant.tremblay@cfa.harvard.edu

About

Grant Tremblay is the External Relations Lead and a Federal Astrophysicist at SAO, as well as a Lecturer in the Harvard Department of Astronomy. As of 2025, he is also the Senior Vice President of the American Astronomical Society and Vice-Chair of the NASA Astrophysics Advisory Committee. He was previously the Project Scientist and Deputy P.I. for the High Resolution Camera aboard the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Prior to joining SAO in 2017, Grant was a NASA Einstein Fellow at Yale University, a European Southern Observatory (ESO) Fellow in Munich, and an Astronomer at ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Grant studies supermassive black holes in the the largest galaxies in the Universe, and is heavily involved in the development of future space missions.

PhD Astrophysics, 2011

Telescopes and Instruments

Chandra

The Chandra X-ray Observatory is NASA’s flagship X-ray observatory, providing essential data on everything from the environment surrounding newborn stars to the emissions from hot plasma inside galaxy clusters. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), as part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, manages Chandra’s day-to-day operations, providing spacecraft control, observation planning, and data processing for astronomers. Chandra is one of NASA’s orbiting Great Observatories, along with the Hubble.

Visit the Chandra Website

Lynx X-Ray Observatory

The Lynx X-ray Observatory is a proposed X-ray space telescope, designed to be the next generation following NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s upcoming Athena Telescope. This observatory will be able to take images of a larger area of the sky in X-ray light with better resolution than any existing telescope, allowing astronomers to study the first supermassive black holes, the hot gas surrounding galaxies as they evolve, and radiation from the earliest stars. Researchers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and other universities are presenting Lynx to NASA for consideration in the 2020 Decadal Survey, with a proposed launch date in the mid-2030s.

Visit the Lynx X-Ray Observatory Website

Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)

Black holes are found in the centers of most galaxies, where they can influence star formation and the distribution of atoms in the environment surrounding them. However, direct observation of a black hole is difficult because it is so small relative to their masses. Founded by Shep Doeleman at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first image ever taken of a black hole: specifically, the ring of light produced by matter just as it falls into the black hole at the center of the nearby galaxy M87. The EHT is a virtual observatory consisting of telescopes spanning the planet, from Greenland to the South Pole. The international collaboration operating the EHT includes observatories affiliated with the Center for Astrophysics: the CfA’s Submillimeter Array (SMA) and the Greenland Telescope.

Visit the EHT Website

MMT Observatory

The MMT Observatory is the premier visible-light and infrared telescope jointly managed by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, part of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and the University of Arizona. Located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) in southern Arizona, this 6.5-meter (21 foot) telescope is used to study objects across the field of astronomy, from the Solar System to distant galaxies. The MMT has provided a testbed for new telescope technologies developed by scientists and engineers at the CfA and the University of Arizona.

Visit the MMT Website