Natasha Batalha
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Natasha Elaine Batalha is a Brazilian and American astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Santa Clara County, California. Her research involves the observation of exoplanets to determine the chemical composition of their atmospheres, and the use of these observations to classify exoplanets. She is also known for providing open source code to analyze exoplanet data from the James Webb Space Telescope and to predict the information that can be obtained from proposed observations.[1]
Batalha was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Brazilian and American parents, and moved several times between Brazil and California as a child.[2] As an undergraduate at Cornell University,[1] Batalha focused her studies on astrobiology, but became more interested in the astronomy of exoplanets through an internship with that focus.[3] She completed her undergraduate studies with a research project using simulated exoplanet data to predict the ability of projected instruments to characterize exoplanets, supervised by Jonathan Lunine.[1] She graduated from Cornell University in 2013 with a bachelor's degree in physics, and continued for a Ph.D. dually in astronomy and astrophysics/astrobiology at the Pennsylvania State University in 2017.[4] Her dissertation, A synergistic approach to interpreting planetary atmospheres, was jointly supervised by Steinn Sigurdsson and James Kasting.[5]
After postdoctoral research at the Space Telescope Science Institute and the University of California, Santa Cruz, she joined the NASA Ames Research Center in 2019.[4]
Recognition
Batalha is a 2025 recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, "for transformational scientific research in the development of open-source systems for the modeling of exoplanet atmospheres and observations".[6]