Ilaria Pascucci, PhD

2025 Henry and Phyllis Koffler Prize in Research, Scholarship & Creative Activity

Dr. Ilaria Pascucci has made transformative contributions to the study of planetary formation and extrasolar planets and is a sought-after collaborator and mentor to her students and postdocs. She has established herself, through the originality and creativity of her research, as an exceptional member of the planetary science and astronomy research communities.

Foremost of her work has been her studies of the initial conditions of planet formation and the physical processes that cause disks to evolve and eventually lead to the final outcomes of planetary systems. She discovered the first unambiguous tracer of thermal disk winds, which were long theorized to drive the final dispersal of planet-forming disks. She discovered that disks around very low-mass stars have a different mix of carbon-bearing molecules than those around young sun-like stars. She made the first measurements of wind mass loss rates, a necessary step to test if winds play a major role in the evolution of disks. She pioneered continuum radiative transfer modeling of the spectral energy distribution of dust disks around sub-stellar objects. In serving as the Instrument Scientist for the Hubble/STIS spectrograph, she revised the high-resolution mode wavelength calibration which continues to be in use by the community.

Dr. Pascucci's publication record and citation metrics are exemplary. She has published over 170 refereed papers which have garnered almost 11,000 citations and an h-index of 61, exceptional metrics for someone at her career stage. She played a critical role in a large NASA program to understand how and where habitable, Earth-like planets with biocritical ingredients form and was selected in 2016 as a member of the Science Definition Team for LUVOIR, one of the four Decadal Survey Mission Concept Studies initiated by NASA. In 2022 she was appointed as Chair of NASA’s Exoplanet Advisory Group advises, which advises NASA on matters related to the discovery and characterization of extrasolar planets; she continues to serve in that position. All of these are indications of the great respect she commands within the exoplanet community.

Dr. Pascucci has advised eight postdoctoral fellows, nine graduate students, and over twenty undergraduate students. Her wide-ranging contributions were recognized with her election as a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society.