Two Academic Stars Join CalTech’s Planetary Sciences Faculty

There are two new women faculty members in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Heather Knutson is an assistant professor of planetary sciences. For the past two years she was a Miller Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Knutson’s research focuses on discovering and analyzing planets orbiting stars other than the sun. She is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Bethany Ehlmann is also a new assistant professor of planetary sciences. She was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in France. Her research focuses on analyzing images from Mars to determine environmental conditions in the early history of the planet. Dr. Ehlmann is a graduate of the University of Washington. She spent two years at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and then earned a Ph.D. at Brown University. She will hold a joint appointment at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by CalTech for NASA.

Heather Knutson and Bethany Ehlmann