Sara Seager Macarthur Award
Sara Seager Macarthur Award
Sara Seager, Class of 1941 Professor, and Chair in the EAPS Program in Planetary Science has been awarded a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship. PAOC congratulations on this highly deserved prestigious honor.
excerpted from MIT News
MIT professor astrophysicist Sara Seager is among 24 recipients nationwide of 2013 MacArthur Fellowships, sometimes referred to as “genius grants.”
The fellowships, awarded annually, carry a five-year, $625,000 prize, which recipients are free to use as they see fit. Including today’s winners, 19 MIT faculty members, and three staff members at the Institute, have won MacArthur Fellowships, which were established in 1981.
Seager, who is the Class of 1941 Professor of Physics and Planetary Science, is an astrophysicist and planetary scientist who has explored the possibility of life elsewhere in the galaxy. Specifically, she has adapted the principles of planetary science to the study of exoplanets — planets outside our own solar system.
The MacArthur Foundation cited Seager, 42, for “quickly advancing a subfield initially viewed with skepticism by the scientific community. A mere hypothesis until the mid-1990s, nearly 900 exoplanets in more than 600 planetary systems have since been identified, with thousands of more planet candidates known.”
Seager joined the MIT faculty in 2006, following appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and the Carnegie Institute of Washington. She is the author of “Exoplanet Atmospheres” and “Exoplanets,” both published in 2010.
Sara Seager's current focus is on exoplanet atmospheres and interiors. Over 450 exoplanets are known to orbit nearby stars. Now that their existence is firmly established, a new era of exoplanet characterization has begun. A subset of exoplanets, called transiting planets, pass in front of and behind their stars, as seen from Earth. Transiting planets have immeasurably changed the field of exoplanets because their physical properties, including average density and atmospheric thermal emission, can now be routinely measured. Seager’s group aims to understand the atmospheric composition and the interior structure of exoplanets, with a focus on the new and growing data set of transiting exoplanets. Seager holds a joint appointment in EAPS and Physics and is the Class of 1941 Professor of Physics and Planetary Science.
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