Sera Markoff has been appointed Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

One of the oldest named professorships in the world – founded in 1704 by Thomas Plume, after Sir Isaac Newton oversaw its creation – previous Plumian Professors include distinguished astronomers Sir Arthur Eddington, Sir Fred Hoyle, and Lord Martin Rees.

Professor Markoff – also announced as a Fellow at Newnham College – is an internationally recognised expert on black hole astrophysics, working at the interface with astroparticle physics. Her research focuses on understanding the extreme interactions of matter occurring around compact objects like black holes, and how they determine the ways in which black holes affect their surroundings.

She is a founding member of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which brought together an array of telescopes spanning the globe and received worldwide media coverage when it captured the first groundbreaking image of a black hole and the ‘shadow’ of its event horizon in 2019. Currently Full Professor of theoretical high energy astrophysics at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy at the University of Amsterdam, Prof Markoff will be the 17^th Plumian Professor at Cambridge, and the first woman to hold the position.

She said: “I’m thrilled to be starting a new chapter of my career at Cambridge. Many amazing people in my field have held this position before me, so it’s an incredible opportunity to be able to carry the baton forward. I really enjoy bringing people together and building up new initiatives, and Cambridge offers a uniquely stimulating environment to further develop the field of astroparticle physics and black hole research, both within the University and UK-wide.

“Among other things, I’m interested in how black holes manage to accelerate high-energy particles to energies millions of times what is achievable on Earth at CERN,” she said. “So that these objects become our fundamental physics laboratories in space, to explore physics in regimes we can never hope to reproduce here. There’s huge potential to grow this field at Cambridge, especially within the Kavli Institute for Cosmology because of where it sits at the interface of physics and astrophysics.”

Another of Prof Markoff’s priorities will be encouraging more people from under-represented backgrounds into science, drawing on her own “non-traditional” journey into the field.

“I didn’t come from a scientific or academic family, so my interest in astrophysics really just came from reading science fiction and comic books. Given that I thought I would go to art school, it was quite an odd thing for me to be interested in, but these books exposed me to the ideas of black holes and instilled a desire to explore the Universe. I was also lucky enough to have many supportive teachers, but I never seriously thought that I would be able to go into a career like this – now I like to joke that I do sci-fi for a living.”

Professor Markoff’s appointment comes as the University celebrates another trailblazer in astronomy, Newnham College alumna Dr Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. The College this month (December) marked the centenary of her groundbreaking thesis demonstrating the composition of stars with a weekend of celebration events.

“There’s still a stereotype about who does this kind of work, and also a lack of opportunity for many people to study science,” said Prof Markoff. “I consistently strive to improve opportunity and access, particularly for people who don’t have advantages. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to affiliate with Newnham College, and of course the connection with Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin resonated with me. She needed to leave Cambridge for the US to be able to study for a PhD in astronomy, and ended up making huge breakthroughs in our understanding of stars.  But she persisted, and as the first female astronomy professor at Harvard really paved the way for us all.

“It’s an enormous privilege to be able to live your life being curious, and I feel very strongly that science is something anybody can do if they are interested enough, and if they put the work in.”

And for Prof Markoff – who studied physics at MIT, and graduated from the University of Arizona with a PhD in theoretical astrophysics in 2000 – black holes are a lifetime project.

“To me they represent the edge of our understanding of our universe, and they are endlessly fascinating. They get a bad rap, because often people just think of them as big vacuum cleaners, but they actually play a very important role in the ecosystem of the universe. We live in a very special period, when we’re just starting to understand the fundamental rules and mathematics of our universe, and black holes are the perfect manifestation of this.

“And they don’t exist in isolation – they are just one piece of a larger puzzle. One of the things I like about Cambridge is that there are other people working on other parts of the puzzle.”

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration – of which Prof Markoff is a core member – succeeded in assembling the first global network of millimetre-radio telescopes to function as a single, Earth-sized virtual telescope. In 2019 and 2022, EHT published the first images of two black holes, seen as a “shadow” within a ring of light, which went viral around the world.

Prof Markoff said: “It was extremely exciting to be part of the team that got to present the first images to the world, and it all happened extremely quickly. It was emotionally intense because we were working around the clock, and we were under a lot of pressure to publish the data, and at the same time we had to be sure our results were correct. It was the biggest telescope we could build without going to space, and the level of precision achieved is incredible –  it’s effectively like standing in the UK and being able to read a newspaper in New York.”

And work is under way to increase the size and sensitivity of the EHT further.

“EHT was unprecedented, but it was just the first step,” said Prof Markoff. “It opened up a new technique that we now want to take further by expanding both on the ground and in space.

“In fact, the EHT is already much improved since our first images were taken, through the addition of several new facilities. These additions provide the sensitivity needed to capture images of one of two target black holes every few days, for over two months. Effectively we can make the first movie of a black hole, in a groundbreaking campaign that will happen this coming Spring”.

Prof Markoff also co-leads a project building an additional telescope in Namibia, which will increase EHT’s sensitivity enough to capture images within hours for the other, smaller, and thus faster flickering black hole.

She said: “Going into space will eventually allow us to make images of many more black holes, and just like when studying animals or people, you really need a population to correctly understand the trends.”

Professor Mark Wyatt, Co-Director of the Institute of Astronomy, said: “The Institute of Astronomy is delighted to welcome Professor Sera Markoff as our next Plumian Professor. Such prestigious positions provide the opportunity to attract extraordinary talent to the UK and Professor Markoff is no exception.

“Professor Markoff brings with her an exciting scientific programme on the study of accretion on to black holes, which she carries out through observations using cutting edge astronomical facilities and computational simulations of the underlying processes. Her scientific vision and interdisciplinary approach will shape the landscape of astronomy for decades to come, not just across Cambridge, but also nationally and internationally.”

Professor Markoff's inaugural lecture is scheduled to take place on Thursday 7 May, 2026.

The Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy is one of the two named professorships within Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy – alongside the Professor of Astrophysics (1909), which Professor Hiranya Peiris has held since 2023.

Words: Stephen Bevan
Images of Prof Markoff: Tina Korhonen
Published: 10th December, 2025

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