Dr. Krista Lynne Smith, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, has been selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Astrophysics Division to serve on the joint European Space Agency (ESA)-NASA science team for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, which is scheduled to begin searching for gravitational wave signatures in space over the next decade.

Smith, an observational astrophysicist who studies supermassive black holes, is one of six U.S. scientists announced as members of the LISA science team on June 24. Their role is to provide scientific leadership for the mission while also serving as an ambassador between the agencies and the scientific community.

According to NASA, Smith and her U.S. colleagues will join 11 European scientists selected by ESA through an open call, as well as two interdisciplinary scientists and a representative of the LISA consortium on the LISA science team. The team will be co-chaired by the LISA project scientists from ESA and NASA. The full composition of the team will be announced by ESA later this summer.

The LISA mission was recently added to ESA's flight programme and is scheduled to launch in 2035. The ambitious space-based gravitational-wave observatory will detect gravitational waves in space using lasers fired between three spacecraft more than 1.6 million kilometres apart and flying in a triangular formation. The aim is to measure how gravitational waves change their relative distances. During its nominally 4.5-year mission, LISA will observe millihertz-band gravitational waves produced by compact binary star systems, merging supermassive black holes and other exotic phenomena.

Smith joined the Texas A&M faculty in fall 2023 and is a member of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy. She earned her Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Maryland as a NASA Earth and Space Sciences Fellow in 2017, then completed a three-year Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University's Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology before beginning her independent academic career as an assistant professor of physics at Southern Methodist University in 2020.

Smith was born and raised in the suburbs of Dallas. As an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, she first became interested in the confluence of extreme physical phenomena at all wavelengths in the central regions of active galaxies. There she made her first major forays into optical spectroscopy and database analysis, working with the huge sample of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Her current research focuses on the behavior of energy and matter around supermassive black holes, time-domain observations of accretion disks and black hole jets, the search for binary AGN, and the effects of AGN on their host galaxies.

Smith uses a variety of ground- and space-based instruments for her research, including the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), the Swift X-ray Telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the Very Large Telescope-Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (VLT-MUSE), the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and the Very Large Array (VLA) radio observatory. To date, she has received a number of grants and authored more than 30 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals. She has also given dozens of invited talks, including several plenary lectures. She is also active in STEM mentoring and education work.

Learn more about Smith and her teaching, research and service activities or the LISA mission.

By Shana K. Hutchins, Texas A&M University College of Arts and Sciences

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