Jessica Lu
Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley
Research Focus
About Jessica
Prof. Jessica Lu is conducting a search for free-floating stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way using gravitational microlensing. Her group also studies star formation in extreme environments such as in massive young clusters and the Galactic Center. Prof. Lu also helps develop instruments and methods needed for these projects, including laser-guided adaptive optics (AO) systems on ground telescopes and infrared astrometry from space.
Prof. Jessica Lu received a bachelors in physics from the MIT in 2000. She worked as a software engineer for 3 years before returning to academia. She received a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics at UCLA in 2008. Her postdoctoral work was conducted as a Millikan fellow at Caltech and a NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics fellow at the University of Hawaii, Institute for Astronomy. She joined the IfA faculty in 2013 and moved to join the faculty of the UC Berkeley astronomy department in 2016.
Honors
Caltech Milikan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Observational Astronomy
Kavli Fellow
NSF Astronomy Postdoctoral Fellowship
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
UC Berkeley Prytanean Award
Education
Postdoc
University of Hawaii, Manoa, 07/2011 - 06/2013
Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, 09/2008 - 07/2011
Ph.D.
Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Los Angeles, 2008
Bachelor's
Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000
