Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor of astronomy at Cornell University, has been awarded the 2025 Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences. Presented annually, the award honors outstanding public communication by an active planetary scientist whose efforts have advanced the general public’s understanding and enthusiasm for the field.
Dr. Kaltenegger and her lab seek to identify signs of life on habitable planets orbiting different colored stars and remnants. She has worked with NASA and the European Space Agency on missions to find habitable worlds, leveraging her pioneering work on modeling light fingerprints of Earth through geological times. To date, she has identified some 1,000 stars that could see Earth dim the Sun from their vantage points, potentially revealing us to extraterrestrial life. The asteroid, 7734 Kaltenegger, was named in her honor.
At Cornell, Dr. Kaltenegger is founding director of the Carl Sagan Institute, which provides extensive public outreach, including a YouTube channel showcasing technical and popular science talks. In addition to her work at Cornell, Dr. Kaltenegger frequently appears on media outlets and podcasts to disseminate her research to the public. She is also the author of the critically-acclaimed book, Alien Earths: The New Science for Planet Hunting in the Cosmos (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), which has been translated into 10 languages.
Dr. Kaltenegger holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from what is now the University of Graz in Austria.