Brief Biography

Renu Malhotra earned her M.S. in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi in 1983, and her Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University in 1988. She did post-doctoral research at Cornell and at Caltech, and worked as a staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. In 2000 she joined the faculty of The University of Arizona in Tucson. She is currently serving as Chair of the Theoretical Astrophysics Program. Her work in planetary dynamics has spanned a wide variety of topics, including extra-solar planets and debris disks around stars, the formation and evolution of the Kuiper belt and the asteroid belt, the orbital resonances amongst the moons of the giant planets, and the meteoritic bombardment history of the planets. She has revolutionized our understanding of the history of the solar system by using the orbital resonance between Pluto and Neptune to infer large-scale orbital migration of the giant planets and to predict the existence of the "Plutinos" and other small planets in resonance with Neptune. She has been the recipient of honors and awards from the American Astronomical Society, the International Astronomical Union, The University of Arizona, and the IIT-Delhi.