On Thursday, May 14 at 2 pm ET / 1 pm CT the Yale Club of Chicago, in collaboration with the Yale Regional Clubs Team, will welcome Debra Fischer — the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy at Yale, and one of the university’s most popular teachers — for an illustrated presentation on “Searching for Other Earths.” In her talk, Professor Fischer will tell the story of how her team at Yale built the EXtreme PREcision Spectrograph (EXPRES) and then delivered it across the country to Flagstaff, Arizona, where it is now operating at the Lowell Discovery Telescope complex. Fischer will provide a first peak at early results from EXPRES, which has achieved breakthrough precision, and describe some of the new worlds that her team is discovering. One of the great questions of our time is whether life exists on other worlds, and Fischer's team is in the forefront of helping to answer this question.
Fischer, who also holds the titles of Professor of Geology & Geophysics and Deputy Dean for Faculty Affairs in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has been teaching at Yale since 2009. She is credited with the discovery of hundreds of exoplanets, including the first known multiple planet system in 1999. She is an international authority on the structure of terrestrial worlds and their capacity for harboring life, as well as an expert in developing instrumentation to detect small rocky planets, and she has served on several advisory committees and working groups for NASA.