Dr. Natalie Batalha

Natalie Batalha is an astrophysicist at NASA Ames Research Center and the Mission Scientist for NASA's Kepler Mission. Kepler is designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy for planets orbiting other sun-like stars. With four years of data in hand, Kepler is zeroing in on the answer to the question that drives the mission: are potentially habitable worlds abundant in our galaxy. Batalha has been involved with the Kepler Mission since the proposal stage and has worked on many different aspects of the science, from studying the stars themselves to understanding the planets they harbor. She led the analysis that yielded the discovery in 2011 of Kepler-10b - the first confirmed rocky planet outside our solar system.

In 2000, inspired by the growing number of exoplanet discoveries at the time, Batalha came to NASA's Ames Research Center to join a team that was building a robotic observatory to identify exoplanets using the transit method by detecting the slight dimming effect as they pass across the faces of their host stars. An emerging field at the time, transit photometry is now the method the Kepler Mission uses to search for habitable, Earth-sized planets. Batalha holds a bachelor degree in physics from Berkeley and a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of California at Santa Cruz.