Born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, Feryal Özel received her B.S. in physics and applied mathematics at Columbia University and her Ph.D. at Harvard University. She is the chair of the School of Physics at Georgia Tech. Özel is a founding member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, where she has led the Modeling and Analysis Group. When Özel was working on her dissertation as a graduate student at Harvard, she “fell in love” with black holes and she often wondered if we could actually glimpse a black hole directly — and decided to take on the challenge. In May 2022, fueled by her passion and curiosity, she led EHT’s unveiling of the first image of the supermassive black hole located at the center of our Milky Way galaxy — Sagittarius A* — Sgr A*.