Professor Heather Knutson has been named the inaugural speaker for the Adam P. Showman Distinguished Visiting Lectureship. She will spend the week of April 18, 2022, at LPL, giving lectures and meeting with faculty, students, postdoctoral associates, and staff members.

Professor Knutson studies the dynamics and chemistry of extrasolar planetary atmospheres, one of the many fields in which Professor Adam Showman conducted pioneering research. Dr. Knutson led a team that confirmed the predicted eastward shift of the substellar hotspot in the atmosphere of the exoplanet HD 189733b, a shift that Dr. Showman and collaborators had predicted on the basis of fundamental atmospheric dynamical principles. This pioneering discovery established the field of observational exoplanet meteorology. Professor Knutson also searches for long-period companions in exoplanetary systems and conducts precision infrared photometry and time series analysis.

Professor Knutson obtained her B.S. in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 2004 and her Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University in 2009. She completed her thesis work, Portraits of Distant Worlds: Characterizing the Atmospheres of Extrasolar Planets, with Professor David Charbonneau. She has been with Caltech since 2011.