Courtney Dressing
Title
Assistant Professor; Watson & Marilyn Alberts Chair in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Department
Dept of Astronomy
Faculty URL
Email
Research Expertise and Interest
exoplanets, stars, habitability, astrobiology
Research Description
Courtney Dressing is an assistant professor of Astronomy. She is an observational astronomer focused on detecting and characterizing planetary systems orbiting nearby stars. She uses telescopes on the ground and in space to search for planets, probe their atmospheres, measure their masses, and constrain their bulk compositions.
In the News
August 12, 2022
Brightest stars in the night sky can strip planets to their rocky cores
University of California, Berkeley, astronomers now report a new, Neptune-sized planet — called HD 56414 b — around one of these hot-burning, but short-lived, A-type stars and provide a hint about why so few gas giants smaller than Jupiter have been seen around the brightest 1% of stars in our galaxy.
October 17, 2019
Exoplanet hunter Courtney Dressing awarded 2019 Packard Fellowship
Courtney Dressing’s ongoing search for planets around other stars has won her a prestigious Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering. Dressing, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of astronomy, is one of 22 early career scientists and engineers nationwide who will receive $875,000 each over five years to pursue their research. The new fellows were announced this week by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
February 20, 2019
Seven early-career faculty win Sloan Research Fellowships
Seven assistant professors from the fields of astronomy, biology, computer science, economics and statistics have been named 2019 Sloan Research Fellows. They are among 126 scholars from the United States and Canada whose early-career achievements mark them as being among today’s very best scientific minds. Winners receive $70,000 over the course of two years toward a research project.