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Erini Lambrides was set on becoming an actor when astrophysics cast her onto a more universal stage. Now she’s a research fellow at NASA and the University of Maryland studying supermassive black holes and the phenomenon called Little Red Dots. These dots are pockmarks in images from JWST that seem to indicate the brief—in universal time—period when these black holes were growing. There are so many of them, she says, that they are rewriting astrophysicists’ understanding of the beginnings of galaxies and the formation of black holes. Consider these red dots as preteens in the lifespan of a black hole, Lambrides says: just like their human counterparts, they are a little odd, a bit surprising and kind of hard to explain. “A lot of my work is centered on looking at these objects and understanding how we robustly actually quantify their weirdness to understand how much damage they are going to do in terms of our existing theories about the universe,” she says.

To study the dots, Lambrides first had to show that the existing tools wouldn’t be enough; her field would need to develop new ones for investigating supermassive black holes. Noting that the work she does sometimes puts her “outside the pack,” Lambrides says she doesn’t mind because “that’s where the discovery happens.”

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Outside of her research, Lambrides is a convener. Recognizing that there are scores of would-be scientists who, like her, have discovered science without the family history, the connections or the mentorship in college to get into graduate school, she’s created a program at NASA where postbaccalaureates can conduct research and learn how to successfully apply to graduate programs. By the end of the program’s third year, about 80 percent of its participants on average had gotten into grad school, she says.

This article is part of “The Young American Scientists,” an editorially independent project that was produced with financial support from Regeneron.