Catherine Jane Clarke

Education Clarke matriculated in 1980 to study the Natural Sciences tripos at Clare College, Cambridge where she completed her undergraduate education in 1983. She was subsequently educated at the University of Oxford where she received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1987 for research on binary stars supervised by Geoffrey Bath. Her doctoral thesis was titled "Accretion disc structure in binary star and galactic potentials". This removes material from the disc and is integral for various models of planet formation and migration.

In 2001 she was awarded the University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize for teaching and learning. She co-authored the Principles of Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics textbook with Bob Carswell in 2014. It is a primer for the fluid dynamics required to understand astronomical phenomena.

Her recent work has combined analytical observation and hydrodynamical simulations in exoplanet discovery.

Clarke identified a young star with four planets, the size of Jupiter and Saturn, in orbit around it. The star, CI Tauri, hosts the first hot Jupiter candidate in a protoplanetary disc system. She used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array to search for nearby planets. The closest is in an equivalent orbit to Mercury, whilst the furthest has an orbit three times that of Neptune. She serves as editor of the Elsevier Journal, New Astronomy Reviews. She is a member of the International Astronomical Union.

Clarke's other research interests include self-gravity in disc evolution and formation of brown dwarfs in unstable multiple systems.

Publications