Katja Poppenhaeger

I am a Lecturer in Astrophysics at Queen's University of Belfast (UK) and investigate the formation and evolution of planetary systems in our Milky Way. I am also a Research Associate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (USA), where I previously worked on similar research topics as a postdoctoral researcher for four years. I earned my PhD in Astrophysics from Hamburg University (Germany). I mostly work with data from space telescopes, but from time to time I can also be found doing nightly observations with ground-based telescopes. One of the big questions that interests me is how planets and their potential habitability evolve over time. In order to do that, one needs to understand the host stars of those planets in great detail, and these host stars can be very different from our own central star, the Sun.
I am happy to talk about topics like planets around other stars and in our own solar system, how stars and planets form, and in general about space science and astronomy.