Nationality American Doctoral advisor Guido Munch | ||
Known for among the designers of the Keck observatory | ||
Judith Gamora Cohen is the Kate Van Nuys Page Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. She holds a BA from Radcliffe College, a PhD from Caltech, and a BS from the University of Arizona. Her research in the structure and evolution of stars and galaxies has included developing instrumentation for the Keck observatory and leading the Caltech Faint Galaxy Redshift Survey, with more than 200 published papers.
She has given the Caroline Herschel Distinguished Lecture at Space Telescope Science Institute and the Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Distinguished Lecture at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University.
Some of her research has been described in the popular press. Using laser-guided adaptive optics at the Keck observatory, she showed that several unlikely tight clusters of stars orbiting the Andromeda galaxy were not actually clusters at all. Together with Evan Kirby, she has studied the mass of nearby dwarf galaxy Triangulum II, showing that this galaxy has a surprisingly large mass for its number of visible stars, making it a candidate dark matter galaxy.