Jenny received her BS in Chemistry from the University of Virginia in 2013, followed by a PhD from Harvard University in 2019. She was a NASA Sagan postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago before joining UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in 2023.
Bloom received a PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Caltech in 2002 after receiving an M. Phil in Astronomy in 1997 from Cambridge University, England. He graduated from Harvard College magna cum laude with a double AB in Astronomy & Astrophysics and Physics. Bloom has been awarded the Data-Driven Discovery prize from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society; he is also a former Sloan Fellow, Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society, and Hertz Foundation Fellow. He was co-founder and CTO of Wise.io, an AI...
Professor of Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science; Vice Chair
Astronomy Department
Eugene Chiang received his undergraduate degree in physics from MIT in 1995, and his PhD in astronomy from Caltech in 2000. He teaches a variety of classes in the Astronomy Department, ranging from introductory astrophysics for undergraduate majors, to fluid mechanics and radiative processes for graduate students, to graduate seminars on galactic and planetary dynamics. The most challenging and rewarding class he teaches is order-of-magnitude physics, in which the class tries to estimate any quantity under the sun to within a factor of 10.
Associate Professor of Astronomy; Head Undergraduate Advisor
Astronomy Department
I’m an observational astronomer focused on detecting and characterizing planetary systems orbiting nearby stars. I use telescopes on the ground and in space to search for planets, probe their atmospheres, measure their masses, and constrain their bulk compositions. I am curious about how planets form and evolve with time, the frequency of planetary systems in the Galaxy, and the prospects for detecting life on planets outside of our Solar System.
Planet properties are typically determined relative to the properties of their host stars. Accordingly, my research program also includes...
Alex Filippenko is a Richard & Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences at UC Berkeley. His accomplishments, documented in more than 1120 research papers, have been recognized by several major prizes, including a share of both the Gruber Cosmology Prize (2007) and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2015). One of the world’s most highly cited astronomers, he is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2009) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2015), as well as an elected American Astronomical Society (AAS) Fellow (2021)....
Professor of Earth and Planetary Science, Astronomy
Astronomy Department
Earth and Planetary Science Department
Raymond Jeanloz uses mineral physics to understand the properties, dynamics and evolution of planetary interiors. His group has pioneered combining diamond anvils with laser-driven compression to provide laboratory access to atomic-scale pressures (0.3 Gbar) and new states of chemical bonding (“kilovolt chemistry”). He leads one of the first university teams to perform experiments at the National Ignition Facility, and is also Editor of the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
His research helped provide the first experimental constraints on the temperature at...
Dean of Mathematical & Physical Sciences; Professor of Physics, Astronomy
Astronomy Department
Physics Department
Math Department
Prof. Kahn received his undergraduate degree in Physics from Columbia University in 1975, and his PhD in Physics from UC Berkeley in 1980. He was: Center Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (1980-82), Asst. Prof. of Physics at Columbia (1982-1984), Asst., Assoc., and Full Prof. of Physics and Astronomy at Berkeley (1984-95), I.I. Rabi Prof. of Physics at Columbia (1995-2003), and Cassius Lamb Kirk Prof. In the Natural Sciences at Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Lab (2003-2022). He returned to Berkeley in 2022 to take up his present position...
Prof. Kasen received his B.S. from Stanford University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics from UC Berkeley. Prior to returning to Cal, he was the Alan C. Davis fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a Hubble fellow at UC Santa Cruz. He joined the Berkeley astronomy faculty in 2010, jointly appointed with the physics department and the nuclear science division at LBNL.
Associate Professor of Astronomy; Astronomy Department Chair
Astronomy Department
Jessica Lu received her undergraduate degree in physics from the MIT in 2000. She worked as a software engineer in silicon valley for 3 years before returning to academia to pursue her PhD in astronomy and astrophysics at UCLA, which was granted in 2008. After completing her PhD, she was awarded a Millikan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Observational Astronomy at Caltech. She was also an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) in the University of Hawaii, Manoa before joining the IfA faculty in 2013. In the summer of 2016, Jessica joined the...
Lu received a PhD degree in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018 and bachelor in physics from Peking University in 2013. Before joining UC Berkeley, he was a Burke Fellow at Caltech (2018-2021) and then a Spitzer Fellow at Princeton University (2021-2022).
