Born and raised as a true (I)Spartan, Esra has followed her childhood dreams, becoming an astrophysicist, from her native Turkey to the U.S.
She received her Ph.D. in the NASA MSFC. She has held postdoctoral fellow positions at the Harvard Smithsonian CfA, and MIT prior to her appointment as a staff scientist at MPE. She currently is the lead scientist for eROSITA cluster science and cosmology. Esra’s broad research interests lie in utilizing multiwavelength surveys in understanding the evolution of baryons, constraining cosmological parameters, mapping the large-scale structure, and constraining dark matter models.
Esra served as the co-chair of the U.S. Athena Study Team while she was in the United States. She currently is the co-chair of the new Athena topical panel on Physics Beyond Standard Model.
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Image: An intermediate mass galaxy cluster that has undergone a major merger event was discovered in the eROSITA Equatorial Depth Survey by eROSITA (Liu et al. 2021). Athena WFI survey will discover many clusters of galaxies nearby and at high redshifts. When combined, Athena XIFU and WFI observations will provide insights into the formation and evolution of large-scale structure of the Universe.