Dr. Lucianne Walkowicz is an astronomer and TED Fellow at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, where she studies stellar magnetic activity, how stars influence a planet's suitability as a host for alien life and how to use advanced computing to discover unusual events in large astronomical datasets. She is also an artist and works in a variety of media, from oil paint to sound.
Dr. Walkowicz holds a B.S. in physics from Johns Hopkins University, and a M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Before joining the Astronomy Department at Adler Planetarium in 2014, she was the Kepler Fellow at UC Berkeley and the Henry Norris Russell Fellow at Princeton University. Walkowicz is also the founding director of the new LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program, an initiative to provide astronomy graduate students with training in advanced computing.