Astrophysics influencer uses social media to break science stereotypes

A scientist can wear nail polish, use makeup, and dress fashionably—and be taken seriously. That’s the message that @thatastrogirlie conveys to her tens of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok.

Thatastrogirlie is Clarissa Do Ó, an astronomy postdoc at Caltech who is “passionate about exoplanets” and loves pink. In the photo below, she holds up a poster she presented in February at a conference on high-contrast imaging. “I want to show that a scientist can look like anyone and have many interests,” she says.

Do Ó credits childhood visits with her father to the planetarium in São Paulo, Brazil, for sparking her love of science. After high school, she came to the US to continue her studies, earning her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her PhD from UC San Diego.

At Caltech, Do Ó tests potential instrument design architectures for the NASA flagship space telescope Habitable Worlds Observatory, currently planned for launch in the 2040s. The telescope’s goal is to discover planets that are as much as 10 billion times fainter than their stars, she says. “To image Earthlike planets around Sunlike stars, the telescope will need picometer-level stability.” On a separate project, for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, she charts the orbits of known exoplanets to plan for the first attempts to image exoplanets in reflected light.

After defending her PhD thesis in summer 2025, Do Ó posted a short video about the day on Instagram. “It showed my outfit, which I chose to feel comfortable and confident,” she says. By the next morning, there were about 50 000 views.

That was the start of @thatastrogirlie: “The public is interested in what a science research career looks like,” says Do Ó. “They had so many questions: How long did it take? What will you do next? And they liked that I showed my personality and my femininity. I realized that I could take those two aspects to broaden access to science.” Most of Do Ó’s followers are women aged 18 to 24, she says, and many are interested in science—not only astronomy.

“Every time I make a video,” Do Ó says, “I think about younger me. I think younger me would have liked to see both the life of a scientist and the excitement about fashion and other things.”