2024 Beactrice Hill-Tinsley Lecture Series – Searching for Alien Earths

The AAS and University of Auckland are co-hosting one of this year’s Beatrice Hill-Tinsley Lecture Series.

The BHT Lecturer for 2024 is Lisa Kaltenegger.

Lisa Kaltenegger is the Director of the Carl Sagan Institute for the Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell and Associate Professor in Astronomy. She is a pioneer and world-leading expert in modeling potential habitable worlds and their detectable spectral fingerprint. Her research focuses on how to find life on exoplanets circling other stars. Lisa Kaltenegger served among others on the National Science Foundation’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee that advises the US Congress, and on NASA’s senior review of operating missions. She is a Science Team Member of NASA’s planet hunting mission, TESS, as well as the NIRISS instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope.

Lisa Kaltenegger was named one of America’s Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine, an Innovator to Watch by TIME Magazine, and was selected as one of the European Commission’s Role Models for Women in Science and Research. Among her international awards are the Lise Meitner Lecture of the German and Austrian Physics Society, the Invited Discourse lecture at the IAU General Assembly in Hawaii, the Heinz Meier Leibnitz Prize for Physics of Germany, the Doppler Prize for Innovation in Science of Austria, and the Barry-Jones Inauguration Award of the Royal Astrobiology Society and Open University in Britain. Her review 2017 on How to Characterize Habitable Worlds and Signs of Life was selected by Annual Reviews as part a collection celebrating pioneering women scientists.

She is part of the IMAX 3D movie “The Search for Life in Space” and gives public lectures e.g. at Aspen Ideas Festival, TED Youth, World Science Festival and the Kavli Foundation lecture at the Adler Planetarium, which was live-streamed to 6 continents. Her book “Alien Earths” will be published on April 16 2024 by MacMillan Press. Asteroid Kaltenegger7734 is named after her.

Lisa will be presenting her work in a lecture titled Searching for Alien Earths.

The RASNZ Lecture Trust are delighted and excited to have Lisa as this year’s BHT lecturer, she will no doubt be entertaining and educational to all ages and backgrounds.

Attendance is free but you need to book via the link below

https://www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/searching-for-alien-earths-tickets-810645491487

Venue:

University of Auckland,

Physics Lecture Theatre 1 –  PLT1/303-G20,

Science Centre,

38 Princes Street, Auckland