Sara Seager

Sara Seager is a planetary scientist and astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a research pioneer in the characterization of exoplanets and is currently engaged in a search for life by way of exoplanet atmospheric “biosignature” gases. Professor Seager works on space missions for exoplanets including: CubeSat ASTERIA; the MIT-led NASA Explorer-class mission TESS; and the Starshade Rendezvous Mission (a space-based direct imaging exoplanet discovery concept under technology development) to find a true Earth analog orbiting a Sun-like star. Among other accolades, Professor Seager was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2015, is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow, and has Asteroid 9729 named in her honor.