Catherine Espaillat

Catherine Espaillat is an astrophysicist who studies planet formation. Planets form from the building blocks and raw materials in their planetary nurseries, known as protoplanetary disks. To catch planet formation in action, Dr. Espaillat searches for the telltale footprints that actively forming planets leave behind on these protoplanetary disks. She uses computer simulations and astronomical observations in my research, working with multi-wavelength data spanning X-ray to radio wavelengths. She is the co-PI of ODYSSEUS, an international collaboration of 100+ scientists working on analyzing the HST ULLYSES dataset and obtaining contemporaneous ground-based data. 

Dr. Espaillat received my bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 2003 and earned a PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Michigan in 2009. She went on to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow and was later awarded the NASA Carl Sagan Postdoctoral Fellowship. She joined the Department of Astronomy at Boston University in 2013, where she is currently an Associate Professor. Dr. Espaillat is a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship and the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. For the past decade, she has been committed to diversity and access in the STEM fields and directed mentoring programs for underrepresented groups in STEM. Dr. Espaillat is the founding director of the peer-mentoring program LUMA, which serves URM women astronomers, physicists, and planetary scientists.

Research interests: young stars, planet formation, circumstellar disk structure and evolution, multiwavelength variability, radiative transfer modeling

Website

Google Scholar