Ben Oppenheimer

Dr. Rebecca Oppenheimer is an American astrophysicist and one of three curators in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Oppenheimer is an exoplanetary scientist who develops new instruments to image planets orbiting stars other than the sun with the ultimate goal of finding life outside the solar system.

Oppenheimer attended the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. After graduating in 1990, she attended Columbia University, where she was an I. I. Rabi Science Scholar. She received a BSc in Physics from Columbia in 1994. In 1999 she was granted a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology and spent the following two years at the University of California at Berkeley on a Hubble Space Telescope Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. She is a trans woman.

Oppenheimer holds an adjunct professorship at Columbia University's Department of Astronomy and has published over one hundred research and public-oriented science articles. She is co-discoverer of the first brown dwarf, Gliese 229B, and is active in research on exoplanets, white dwarfs, adaptive optics and coronagraphy.Oppenheimer serves on NASA, NSF and NRC committees. She is the principal investigator for Project 1640, an exoplanet imaging project.

In 2001, she moved back to New York City to conduct research at the American Museum of Natural History, where she joined the faculty in 2004. Oppenheimer regularly gives public and professional lectures on astronomical research.

• 2009: Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists, New York Academy of Sciences
• 2003: Carter Memorial Lecturer, Carter Observatory, Wellington, New Zealand
• 2002-2004: Kalbfleisch Research Fellowship, American Museum of Natural History
• 2002: National Academies of Science, Beckman Frontiers of Science, Invited Participant
• 1999-2002: Hubble Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (listed as Ben Oppenheimer)
• 1994-1997: National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
• 1990-1994: I.I. Rabi Science Scholar, Columbia University
• 1990: Westinghouse Science Competition, Honorable Mention
• 1989: New York Academy of Sciences Science Writing Competition, First Place