Rate My Professor Christy Tremonti

Christy Tremonti is an associate professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research centers on galaxy evolution, with a particular emphasis on the physical processes that regulate star formation in galaxies. As an observational astronomer, she investigates feedback mechanisms from massive stars and supermassive black holes, the triggering and quenching of star formation and black hole growth, and galactic chemical evolution. Tremonti maintains a strong interest in spectroscopy from ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths and is an active member of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) collaboration, where she utilizes data mining techniques to analyze large datasets. Current projects include studies with collaborators on the shutdown of star formation in massive galaxies using SDSS-III data, absorption line signatures of galactic winds in massive star-forming galaxies with and without active black holes, searches for young chemically unenriched galaxies, and multi-wavelength analysis of extreme post-starburst galaxies using observations from Chandra, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Expanded Very Large Array.

Tremonti received her B.A. from Colgate University in 1990 and her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2003. Before joining the faculty at UW-Madison, she was a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Arizona. She has been recognized with the Vilas Mid-Career Investigator Award for research and teaching excellence. Notable publications include 'The host galaxies of active galactic nuclei' (Kauffmann et al., Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2003), which has garnered over 5,000 citations, and contributions to SDSS-IV/MaNGA papers such as 'SDSS-IV/MaNGA: Can Impulsive Gaseous Inflows Explain Simultaneous Bulge Growth and Quenching?' (Pace et al., The Astrophysical Journal, 2021) and 'Characterizing Extreme Emission-line Galaxies' series (Berg et al., 2021; Olivier et al., 2022). Her work has advanced understanding of galaxy formation and evolution through empirical constraints on feedback processes.