Lisa Kaltenegger

Lisa Kaltenegger is the Founding Director of the Carl Sagan Institute to Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell and Associate Professor in Astronomy. She is a pioneer and world-leading expert in modeling potentially habitable worlds and their detectable spectral fingerprint. Lisa Kaltenegger served among others on the National Science Foundation’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee, and on NASA senior review of operating missions. She is a Science Team Member of NASA’s TESS Mission and the NIRISS instrument on JWST.

Lisa Kaltenegger was named one of America’s Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine, an Innovator to Watch by TIME Magazine, and was selected as one of the European Commission’s Role Models for Women in Science and Research. Among her international awards are the Fred Kavli Plenary Lecture of the American Astronomical Society, Invited Discourse lecture at the IAU General Assembly, the Heinz Meier Leibnitz Prize for Physics of Germany, the Doppler Prize for Science Innovation of Austria, and the Barry-Jones Inauguration Award of the Royal Astrobiology Society of Britain. Her review 2017 on How to Characterize Habitable Worlds and Signs of Life was selected by Annual Reviews as part of a collection celebrating pioneering women scientists.

She is part of the IMAX 3D movie “The Search for Life in Space” and gives public lectures e.g. at Aspen Ideas Festival, TED Youth, World Science Festival, AMNH Science Cafe, and the Adler Planetarium. Her public science book “Alien Earths” will be published by St Martin press in April 2024. Asteroid Kaltenegger7734 is named after her.