Natalie Batalha

Natalie M. Batalha (born 1966) is professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. Previously she was a research astronomer in the Space Sciences Division of NASA Ames Research Center and held the position of Co-Investigator and Kepler Mission Scientist on the Kepler Mission, the first mission capable of finding Earth-size planets around other stars. Batalha grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended the University of California, Berkeley. Though she started out as a business major, she switched to physics after learning that everyday occurrences like thin-film interference (why rainbows appear on soap bubbles and oily puddles) could be described mathematically. During her undergraduate, she worked as a stellar spectroscopist, studying sun-like stars. After graduating with her bachelor's degree in physics, she pursued a doctorate in astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Batalha's daughter Natasha Batalha is also an astronomer. The two women are collaborating on projects that discover and describe exoplanets found using the James Webb Space Telescope.