Katherine Louise Bouman (/ˈbaʊmən/;[1] born 1989) is an American engineer and computer scientist working in the field of computational imaging. She led the development of an algorithm for imaging black holes, known as Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors (CHIRP), and was a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team that captured the first image of a black hole.[2][3][4]
The California Institute of Technology, which hired Bouman as an assistant professor in June 2019, awarded her a named professorship in 2020.[5][6] In 2021, asteroid 291387 Katiebouman was named after her.[7] In 2024, she became an associate professor.
Early life and education
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Bouman grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana. Her father, Charles Bouman, is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering at Purdue University.[8]
As a high school student, Bouman conducted imaging research at Purdue University. She graduated from West Lafayette Junior-Senior High School in 2007.[8]
Bouman studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan and graduated summa cum laude in 2011. She earned her master’s degree in 2013 and obtained a doctoral degree in electrical engineering and computer science in 2017 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[9]
At MIT, she was a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).[10][11] This group also worked closely with MIT’s Haystack Observatory and with the Event Horizon Telescope.[12][13] She was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. Her master’s thesis, Estimating Material Properties of Fabric through the Observation of Motion,[14] was awarded the Ernst Guillemin Award for best Master’s Thesis in electrical engineering.[15] Her Ph.D. dissertation, Extreme imaging via physical model inversion: seeing around corners and imaging black holes, was supervised by William T. Freeman.[11] Prior to receiving her doctoral degree, Bouman delivered a TEDx talk, How to Take a Picture of a Black Hole, which explained algorithms that could be used to capture the first image of a black hole
