Biography:Debra Fischer

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Short description: American astronomer and academic
Debra Ann Fischer
Debra Fischer
Fischer with a keplerian fit for υ And
Born1951
Alma materUniversity of Iowa, San Francisco State University, University of California at Santa Cruz
Known forAstronomy, Exoplanetology
Scientific career
FieldsAstronomy
InstitutionsProfessor of Astronomy at Yale University

Debra Ann Fischer is a professor of astronomy at Yale University researching detection and characterization of exoplanets. She was part of the team to discover the first known multiple-planet system.[1][2]

Education

Fischer received her degree from the University of Iowa in 1975, a masters of science from San Francisco State University in 1992, and her PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1998.[3][4]

Research and career

Fischer has co-authored over 100 papers on dwarf stars and sub-stellar mass objects in the galactic neighborhood, including many on extrasolar planets. Her work "The Twenty Five Year Lick Planet Search" is summarized in a paper by Fischer, Marcy & Spronck 2014. She is a principal investigator with the N2K Consortium searching for exoplanets. She co-leads the planet search team with Gregory P. Laughlin and Jessi Cisewski looking for extrasolar planets.[2][5] She was the primary investigator for Chiron, the CTIO High Resolution Spectrometer.[6] In 2011, she started the Fiber-optic Improved Next-generation Doppler Search for Exo-Earths with the Planetary Society, an instrument that will help planet hunters find Earth-like extrasolar planets.

Honors and awards

  • Elected a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2020 [7]
  • 2021 class of Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[8]
  • Elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021[9]

See also

  • List of stars with confirmed planets
  • List of women in leadership positions on astronomical instrumentation projects

References

  1. Butler, Paul; Marcy, Geoffrey W.; Fischer, Debra A.; Brown, Timothy M.; Contos, Adam R.; Korzennik, Sylvain G.; Nisenson, Peter; Noyes, Robert W. (December 1999). "Evidence for Multiple Companions to υ Andromedae". The Astrophysical Journal 526 (2): 916–927. doi:10.1086/308035. Bibcode1999ApJ...526..916B. 
  2. 2.0 2.1 Overbye, Dennis (12 May 2013). "Finder of New Worlds". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/science/finder-of-new-worlds.html. Retrieved 13 May 2014. 
  3. "Radcliffe Institute Guest Lecturer Bio". Archived from the original on 12 March 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20090312010408/http://www.radcliffe.edu/research/2006fischer.aspx. Retrieved 4 February 2008. 
  4. "Interview with D. Fisher, Planet-Hunter". theWoman Astronomer. 1 January 2008. http://www.womanastronomer.com/dfischer.htm. Retrieved 4 February 2008. 
  5. "N2K Consortium". Yale astronomy. http://exoplanets.astro.yale.edu/science/n2k.php. Retrieved 5 March 2018. 
  6. "MRI: Development of Chiron: CTIO High Resolution Spectrometer". Research Commercialization and SBIR Center. San Francisco State University. Archived from the original on 2 March 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20140302211652/http://center.ncet2.org/index.php?option=com_patents&controller=awards&tmpl=component&view=awards&layout=award&frame=awards&user=6344&id=18369_nsf. Retrieved 27 February 2014. 
  7. "AAS Fellows". AAS. https://aas.org/grants-and-prizes/aas-fellows. Retrieved 27 September 2020. 
  8. "2021 Fellows". American Association for the Advancement of Science. https://www.aaas.org/page/2021-fellows. 
  9. "2021 NAS Election". http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/2021-nas-election.html.