Catherine Espaillat is an astrophysicist who studies planet formation. Planets form out of the building blocks and raw materials that were present in their planetary nurseries, known as protoplanetary disks. In order to catch planet formation in action, Professor Espaillat searches for the telltale footprints that actively forming planets leave behind on these protoplanetary disks. She employs both computer simulations and astronomical observations in her research, working with multi-wavelength data spanning the X-ray to radio wavelengths.

Dr. Espaillat received her bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 2003 and earned a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Michigan in 2009. She went on to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow and she was later also awarded the NASA Carl Sagan Fellowship. Dr. Espaillat joined the Department of Astronomy at Boston University in 2013 where she is currently an Associate Professor. She is a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship and the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award. For the past decade, Dr. Espaillat has been committed to diversity and access in the STEM fields and she has directed mentoring programs for underrepresented groups in STEM. Currently, she is the founding director of the peer-mentoring program League for Underrepresented Minoritized Astronomers (LUMA), which serves URM women astronomers.