Elisa Quintana
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Through Astronomy, Exoplanet and Habitable zone
Early life and education
Quintana was born in Silver City, New Mexico. Her father Leroy Quintana, is a Chicano poet and her grandfather was a miner who appeared in blacklisted movie Salt of the Earth. Aged 9 she moved to San Diego. She attended Grossmont College and transferred to the University of California at San Diego where she obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics. During her time as an undergraduate Quintana worked on astrodynamics the KidSat program (later renamed EarthKAM) with first US woman astronaut Sally Ride who was a professor in San Diego.
She received Master's degrees in both Aerospace Science and Physics from the University of Michigan and earned her PhD in Physics from the University of Michigan in 2004. Her PhD thesis for on the topic of planet formation in binary star systems. Quintana was amongst the first people to study whether planets could form in the Alpha Centauri system.
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Academic career
Quintana was a member of the NASA Kepler Mission Team at NASA Ames Research Center from 2006 to 2017. She worked as a scientific programmer developing the Kepler pipeline, for which she was awarded the NASA Software of the Year in 2010. She was part of the team that discovered the first rocky exoplanet Kepler-10b, the first exoplanet to orbit the habitable zone of another star Kepler-22b, and the first Earth-sized exoplanet Kepler-20e. In 2014, she led the team that discovered Kepler-186f, an earth-sized exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone a red dwarf star, which was published in the journal Science.
Quintana has been studying the frequency of giant impacts on exoplanets and comparing how their frequency compares with Earth. In 2017, she moved to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where she serves as Deputy Project Scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (formerly known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope) and Deputy Project Scientist for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.
Quintana is one of the few female Hispanic scientists in astronomy.