59th Faculty Research Lecture Featuring Professor Natalie Batalha

The UC Santa Cruz Academic Senate is delighted to invite you to the 59th Faculty Research Lecture

Featuring Natalie Batalha Professor, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics Director of Astrobiology & UC Presidential Chair

Thursday, November 6, 2025
6:30 PM – 7:30 PM

• Reception to follow
• This event is free and open to the public. Seating will begin at 6:00 p.m
• Parking permits will be available for purchase for $5 in the Performing Arts lot 126, ”A” permits are required during the week until 8pm. Park Mobile options are available in this same lot. Please follow the event signage at the base of campus and a parking attendant will assist you.

Register to attend here
The lecture will be held in person and also available to view via livestream.

Thirty Years of Exoplanet Discovery

The first exoplanet orbiting a normal sun-like star was announced in October 1995. Discoveries have been trickling in at an accelerating pace ever since, with the roster of new worlds surpassing 6000 just this year. Due to a confluence of lucky events, I’ve been afforded a front row seat to exoplanet discovery over those last three decades. The science has taken me from humble mountaintops like Lick Observatory to the most powerful space telescopes like Kepler, TESS, and Webb. As the story unfolds, so to does my human perspective. I will share the view from this front row seat — how the story started and where it’s going, what we know and don’t know, and what the next generation can look forward to as we search for evidence of living worlds beyond the Solar System.

Natalie Batalha is a Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics and Director of Astrobiology at UC Santa Cruz. She uses ground and space-based telescopes to find and characterize planets orbiting other stars in the galaxy, with the ultimate goal of searching for evidence of life beyond the Solar System.  Prior to UCSC, Dr. Batalha was a research scientist at NASA Ames where she served as Science Team Lead and Project Scientist for NASA’s Kepler mission. She led the team that discovered the first confirmed rocky exoplanet (Kepler-10b). Over the next decade, she played a central role in expanding the Kepler catalog of discoveries and guiding the team through the statistical analyses that demonstrated the prevalence of potentially habitable planets in our Galaxy. For her work on Kepler, Batalha was awarded a NASA Public Service Medal (2011) and the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award (2017).  Most recently, Batalha led the team that achieved the first definitive detection of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet (WASP-39b), a breakthrough that showcased the James Webb Space Telescope’s extraordinary power to probe alien skies and ushered in a new era of atmospheric exploration. At UCSC, she is working to grow an Astrobiology program that will place UCSC at the center of the search for life beyond Earth.