Debra Fischer

Debra Ann Fischer is an American astronomer who is the Eugene Higgins professor of astronomy at Yale University researching detection and characterization of exoplanets. She has detected hundreds of exoplanets and was part of the team to discover the first known multiple-planet system.

Education
Fischer received her degree from the University of Iowa in 1975, a masters of science in physics from San Francisco State University in 1992, and her PhD in astrophysics from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1998.

Research and career
Fischer has co-authored more than 300 papers on dwarf stars and exoplanets. In two papers with Jeff Valenti, she quantified a correlation between the chemical composition of host stars and the formation of orbiting gas giant planets. She led the N2K Consortium with Gregory P. Laughlin, detecting dozens of exoplanets around metal-rich stars at Keck Observatory, Subaru Observatory, and the Magellan Observatory. Her work "The Twenty Five Year Lick Planet Search" is summarized in a 2014 paper. In 2015, she organized an international workshop on Extreme Precision Radial Velocities at Yale University and led the conference proceedings paper with 55 co-authors. With the Oxford Zooniverse team, Fischer co-founded the Planet Hunters Citizen Science project.

Fischer has worked on instruments to improve measurement sensitivity for the detection of exoplanets. In 2011, she started the Fiber-optic Improved Next-generation Doppler Search for Exo-Earths with the Planetary Society, an improvement that helped planet hunters find smaller, more Earth-like extrasolar planets. In 2014, she worked with colleagues at Yale University on a microcomb for precise wavelength calibration. She was the principal investigator for three spectrographs: CHIRON, the CTIO High Resolution Spectrometer. , VUES, the Vilnius University Echelle Spectrograph and EXPRES, the EXtreme PREcision Spectrograph.

Fischer and colleagues  have also helped to advance statistical and machine learning methods to improve data analysis and sensitivity to low mass planets. Fischer served as the Division Director at the National Science Foundation from 2021 - 2023.

Honors and awards

 * Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012
 * Elected a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2020
 * 2021 class of Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
 * Elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2021