Natalie Batalha

Born on 14 May 1966 in Northern California, NASA astronomer Natalie Batalha is a leading exoplanet hunter. She earned her BS in physics and astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989 and her PhD in astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz in 1997. After doing a postdoctoral fellowship in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she returned to California. In 2000 she went to work at NASA’s Ames Research Center, where she joined the Kepler science team. In 2002 Batalha also joined the faculty of San Jose State University. At that time, the Kepler space observatory, which was to search for Earth-size exoplanets using transit photometry, was still in the planning stages. Batalha helped convince the team to focus the telescope’s target area just above the plane of the Milky Way to avoid light contamination. Since the telescope launched in 2009, Batalha has figured prominently in the mission’s planet finds. In 2011 she led the discovery of Kepler-10b, the mission’s first confirmation of a rocky planet outside the solar system. Batalha and her Kepler coworkers have identified thousands of candidate exoplanets, of which at least a dozen are Earth-size and orbit in their stars’ habitable zones. In 2011 she was awarded a NASA Public Service Medal for her exceptional work as a member of the Kepler science team, and in 2017 she received the Lecar Prize from the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Also in 2017, Batalha was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. (Photo credit: NASA)

Date in History: 14 May 1966