Catherine Espaillat

Catherine C. Espaillat is an American astronomer whose research is focused on the formation of planets, including the study of protoplanetary disks and young stellar objects. She is an associate professor of astronomy at Boston University, where she directs the Institute for Astrophysical Research.

Education and career
Espaillat comes from a working-class immigrant family; her parents emigrated to the US from the Dominican Republic. She was interested in astronomy since childhood, but entered Columbia University intending to become a physician; her focus changed to a career in astronomy after taking an introductory course in the subject as a sophomore. After graduating in 2003 with a degree in astronomy, she went to the University of Michigan for graduate study, earned a master's degree there in 2005, and completed her Ph.D. in 2009, under the supervision of Nuria Calvet.

She became a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 2009 to 2013, supported by the National Science Foundation and by a NASA Carl Sagan Postdoctoral Fellowship. Next, she joined the Boston University Department of Astronomy as an assistant professor in 2013. She was promoted to associate professor in 2020.

Espaillat is also the director of the League of Underrepresented Minoritized Astronomers (LUMA), a peer mentoring community for women from underrepresented groups in astronomy and related fields, which she founded in 2015.

Recognition
Espaillat was named as a Sloan Research Fellow and as a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. In 2022, the American Association for the Advancement of Science named Espaillat as an AAAS Fellow.

She was a keynote speaker at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.