Jacqueline Hewitt

Jacqueline Hewitt is the Julius A. Stratton Professor in Electrical Engineering and Physics and was appointed Director of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in January 2002. Professor Hewitt began her career at MIT in 1986 as a postdoctoral associate in the Very Long Baseline Interferometry group at the MIT Haystack Observatory. After a one-year sojourn as a research staff member in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, she returned to MIT in 1989 as an Assistant Professor of physics.

Professor Hewitt stepped down as director of the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in January 2019.

Research Interests: Professor Hewitt’s research interests are in the application of techniques of radio astronomy and signal processing to problems in astrophysics. Current topics are low-frequency radio studies of the Epoch of Reionization and the Dark Ages, and surveys of transient astronomical radio emission. She was a founding collaborator in the Murchison Widefield Array project, a low-frequency radio telescope in Western Australia designed to study the Epoch of Reionization. Professor Hewitt is currently one of the lead investigators of a larger array with similar scientific goals, the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array telescope project in South Africa (see MIT News).