Reva Williams


Reva Kay Williams is an American astrophysicist at the University of Toledo. She is generally considered to be the first Black-American woman to receive a PhD in astrophysics. She is the first person to successfully work out the Penrose mechanism to extract energy from black holes. The Penrose mechanism uses Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity to extract energy from the ergosphere of a rotating black hole.

Early life and education

Williams was born in Memphis, Tennessee. She moved to Chicago at the age of 6 and studied at Malcolm X College, earning an A.A. in liberal arts in 1977 and being voted graduate student of the year. She studied astronomy at Northwestern University, earning a B.A. in 1980. She joined Indiana University Bloomington for her MA and PhD, achieving her doctorate in astrophysics in 1991.

Career

Williams was awarded a National Research Council postdoctoral minority fellowship and moved to the University of Florida in 1993. She joined Bennett College in 1998, winning the Belle Ringer Image Role Model Award, and acting as an Associate Professor of Astrophysics and Director, Center for Women and Science. Her work considered gravitomagnetism. She looked at the Penrose scattering process in the ergosphere of Kerr black holes. This formed a major part of her research, searching for the energy sources of active galactic nuclei. Williams was the first person to work out the Penrose mechanism of black holes. Her calculations explained that black hole jets are emitted as escaping tornado-like coils of photons and electrons - black holes drag spacetime into rotation near their cores, which may also produce uneven jets. She showed that the Lense-Thirring Effect could cause the high energies and luminosities. She became interested in gravitational instabilities and the form of dark matter in the early universe, but was unable to remain at the University of Florida after her postdoctoral fellowship ended. She also looked at how black holes could be used to power gamma-ray bursts. She struggled to get funding for her research when the University of Florida decided against supporting relativistic astrophysics research and did not extend her fellowship.
Since 2009 she has been a research assistant professor at the University of Toledo. She was awarded a National Science Foundation grant to study the jet structure and energy generation of quasars and other active galactic nuclei. This study combines Monte Carlo simulations with the physics of general relativistic supermassive Kerr black holes. Having demonstrated that Kerr black holes can provide the energy of active galactic nuclei, she hopes to create a unified model showing that active galactic nuclei, microquasars, and gamma-ray bursts are powered by rotating black holes of different masses and/or accretion disk properties. She also works on dark energy and whether it could be a manifestation of gravity.