Anna-Christina Eilers is originally from San Francisco, California, but grew up in Germany. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from the University of Goettingen with a focus on neuroscience. After an internship at the European Space Agency in The Netherlands she decided to study astrophysics at the University of Heidelberg, where she obtained her Master’s degree and completed her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg.

During her thesis she worked with Prof. Joe Hennawi and Prof. Hans-Walter Rix on both high-redshift quasars and the early growth phases of supermassive black holes, as well as on data-driven models of stars within our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. In 2019 she was awarded a NASA Hubble Fellowship and the Pappalardo Fellowship to continue her research at MIT. In July 2023 she will join MIT’s Physics faculty as an assistant professor.

In her research, Eilers develops new methods to study the timescales of quasar activity and supermassive black hole growth phases. She aims to understand how galaxies and their central supermassive black holes evolve through cosmic time, how the accretion physics might change in the early universe, and what the nature of the seeds of these early black holes could be.