Chief Scientist of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech/IPAC

Dr. Jessie Christiansen is the Chief Scientist of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech. After obtaining her PhD at the UNSW in 2008, she did her postdoctoral research at Harvard University before moving to NASA Ames in California in 2010 to work on the NASA Kepler mission. She subsequently joined the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute in 2013, where she has worked on the NASA Kepler, K2, TESS, Roman, UVEX, and Pandora missions, and is helping plan for NASA’s next big flagship mission - Habitable Worlds Observatory. Dr Christiansen’s research is in the detection and characterisation of exoplanets - planets around other stars - and understanding exoplanet populations. She is married to fellow astronomer Philip Hopkins, a professor at Caltech, and also wrangles eleven-year-old twins, two cats, and a dog in their house in the foothills of Los Angeles.