Kollmeier earned a bachelor's degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 2000. She moved to Ohio State University for her doctoral studies on the intergalactic medium, which she completed in 2006. After graduating Ohio State University, Kollmeier was a Hubble Fellow and a Carnegie Princeton Fellow. She joined the staff at Carnegie Institution for Science in 2008 and is the Founding Director of the Carnegie Theoretical Astrophysics Center. In 2017 she assumed the position of Director of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Phase 5 (SDSS-V) which is a robotic spectroscopic exploration of the sky in optical and near-IR bands. From 2021-2024 she was the Director of Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) .
Kollmeier is an observationally-oriented theoretical astrophysicist. Her research focuses on the formation of structure within the Universe. She combines the use of cosmological hydrodynamic simulations with analytic theory to understand how galaxies and black holes formed from fluctuations in the density of the early universe. She studies everything from the Intergalactic medium to the Milky Way and supermassive black holes. One of the new facilities built for SDSS-V is the Local Volume Mapper (LVM) which is a massive fiber-fed integral field unit spectrograph with a very large etendue. The primary purpose of LVM is the study of the Galactic interstellar medium (including that of the Magellanic Clouds and nearby galaxies). This new facility aims to shed light on the self-regulation mechanisms of galaxies.
Title: SDSS-V: Pioneering Panoptic Spectroscopy
Abstract: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey V (SDSS-V) is pioneering panoptic spectroscopy. SDSS-V consists of three separate large-scale surveys: 1) Black Hole Mapper (BHM) will trace the growth physics of black holes across the Universe, 2) Milky Way Mapper (MWM) is designed to decode the chemo-dynamical history of the Galaxy and investigate fundamental issues in stellar physics, and 3) the Local Volume Mapper (LVM) will increase our understanding of the self-regulation mechanisms of galactic ecosystems. BHM and MWM use wide-angle, fiber spectrographs to acquire optical (R ~ 2000, 500 fibers) and near-infrared (R ~ 22,000, 298 fibers) spectra at the 100-inch du Pont Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory and the 2.5-m Sloan Foundation Telescope at Apache Point Observatory. The LVM performs ultra wide-field integral field spectroscopy across approximately 4300 sq deg in the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds, enabled by a new dedicated facility (LVM-I) at Las Campanas Observatory; the system employs an integral field unit with 1801 lenslet coupled fibers arranged in a hexagon of 0.25 degree diameter feeding multiple R=4000 optical spectrographs covering 3600-9800 A.