Heather A. Knutson

Heather A. Knutson is an astrophysicist and professor of planetary science at California Institute of Technology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. Her research is focused on the study of exoplanets, their composition and formation.

In 2016, she was referred to in Popular Science as "the first exoplanet meteorologist, determining the local temperature, weather, and even composition of the atmosphere".

Education Knutson holds Jupiter over Bunsen burner; artistically altered image from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As an undergraduate in the physics department of Johns Hopkins University, Knutson worked part-time as an intern with the Space Telescope Science Institute. In 2004, she graduated with a B.S. in physics with both departmental and university honors.

Following her undergraduate work, Knutson completed doctoral studies at Harvard University with doctoral advisor David Charbonneau. She completed her Ph.D. in astronomy there in 2009 upon successful defense of her thesis, entitled Portraits of distant worlds: Characterizing the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.

Academic career Following completion of her doctorate, Knutson worked for two years as a Miller Institute postdoctoral fellow in the department of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. There, she studied the atmospheres of so-called "hot Jupiters," exoplanet gas giants orbiting close to their star, by studying the light from those stars as they were partially eclipsed by their planets.

Since 2011, Knutson has been at the California Institute of Technology. National Science Foundation CAREER (Faculty Early Career Development) Award, 2016 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy, American Astronomical Society, 2015 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Physics, 2015 Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy, American Astronomical Society, 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, 2004