FORA.tv Speaker - Imke de Pater

Imke de Pater is a professor in the Department of Astronomy at UC Berkeley, and a world-renowned planetary scientist. She is an authority on modeling and mapping the planets of our solar system, and led a worldwide campaign to observe the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994.

A frequent user of the huge Keck telescopes in Hawaii, she has discovered methane drizzle on Saturn's moon Titan, modeled Jupiter's magnetic fields, and revealed the dynamic behavior of Neptune's skies. Her graduate-level textbook, Planetary Sciences, co-authored with Jack J. Lissauer, was the winner of the 2007 Chambliss Award for Astronomical Writing from the American Astronomical Society.