Andrea Mia Ghez (born June 16, 1965) is an American astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Lauren B. Leichtman & Arthur E. Levine chair in Astrophysics, at the University of California, Los Angeles.

[1][3] The Nobel Prize was awarded to Ghez and Genzel for their discovery of a supermassive compact object, now generally recognized to be a black hole, in the Milky Way's Galactic Center.

[8][6][11] The Apollo program Moon landings inspired Ghez to aspire to be the first female astronaut, and her mother encouraged that goal by purchasing a telescope.

[19] Ghez's research employs high spatial resolution imaging techniques, such as the adaptive optics system at the Keck telescopes,[20] to study star-forming regions and the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way known as Sagittarius A*.

[22] The high resolution of the Keck telescopes[23] gave a significant improvement over the first major study of galactic center kinematics by Reinhard Genzel's group.

Keck Telescope and the use of adaptive optics to correct for the turbulence of the atmosphere, these images of the Galactic Center are at very high spatial resolution and have made it possible to follow the orbits of stars around the black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*).

[4] Ghez and Genzel were awarded one half of the prize for their discovery that a supermassive black hole most likely governs the orbits of stars at the center of the Milky Way.

[34] Ghez was the fourth woman to win the physics Nobel since its inception, being preceded by Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), and Donna Strickland (2018).