The Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2012 Laureate

Jane Luu was born in 1963 in Saigon, Vietnam.  Since 2001, she has been a member of the technical staff at Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Stanford University in 1984 and a PhD in Planetary Astronomy from MIT in 1990.  In the years 1990 to 1994, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at various institutions, namely, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, UC Berkeley and Stanford University.  She was appointed Assistant Professor at Harvard University in 1994 and Professor at Leiden University, the Netherlands in 1998.  The asteroid 5430 Luu is named in her honour.

The Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2012 is awarded in equal shares to David C Jewitt and Jane Luu for their discovery and characterization of trans-Neptunian bodies, an archeological treasure dating back to the formation of the solar system and the long-sought source of short period comets.