Natalie Batalha
Natalie M. Batalha is professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. Previously she was a research astronomer in the Space Sciences Division of NASA Ames Research Center and held the position of Co-Investigator and Kepler Mission Scientist on the Kepler Mission, the first mission capable of finding Earth-size planets around other stars. Biography. Batalha grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended the University of California, Berkeley. Though she started out as a business major, she switched to physics after learning that everyday occurrences like thin-film interference (why rainbows appear on  soap bubbles and oily puddles) could be described mathematically. During her undergraduate, she worked as a stellar spectroscopist, studying sun-like stars. After graduating with her bachelor's degree in physics, she pursued a doctorate in astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Career. In 1997, William Borucki added Batalha to the science team and she started work on transit photometry. She has been involved with the Kepler Mission since the design and funding, and as one of the original Co-Investigators was responsible for the selection of the more than  150,000 stars monitored by the telescope. She now works closely with team members at Ames Research Center to identify viable planets from the data of the Kepler mission. She led the analysis that yielded the discovery in 2011 of Kepler 10b, the first confirmed rocky planet outside our solar system. Presentations. Batalha presented 'A Planet for Goldilocks' at Talks at Google in 2016. She presented 'From Lava Worlds to Living Worlds' at Breakthrough Initiatives in 2019. Recognition. In 2017, Batalha and two other exoplanet scientists were named to Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World. In the  same year, Batalha won Smithsonian Magazine's American Ingenuity Award in Physical Sciences. She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2020.