19 Facts About Sara Seager

Sara Seager was born on 21 July 1971 and is a Canadian-American astronomer and planetary scientist.

Sara Seager is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is known for her work on extrasolar planets and their atmospheres.

Sara Seager is the author of two textbooks on these topics, and has been recognized for her research by Popular Science, Discover Magazine, Nature, and TIME Magazine.

Sara Seager was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and is Jewish.

Sara Seager's father, David Seager, who lost his hair when he was 19 years old, was a pioneer and one of the world's leaders in hair transplantation and the founder of the Seager Hair Transplant Center in Toronto.

Sara Seager earned her BSc degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Toronto in 1994, assisted by a NSERC University Undergraduate Student Research Award, and a PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1999.

Sara Seager held a postdoctoral research fellow position at the Institute for Advanced Study between 1999 and 2002 and a senior research staff member at the Carnegie Institution of Washington until 2006.

Sara Seager joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in January 2007 as an associate professor in both physics and planetary science, was granted tenure in July 2007, and was elevated to full professor in July 2010.

Sara Seager was elected a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society in 2020.

Sara Seager is married to Charles Darrow and they have two sons from her first marriage.

In years since 2020, Sara Seager has been focusing on work related to Venus, with the potential discovery of phosphine, a biosignature gas, in the upper atmosphere.

Sara Seager developed a parallel version of the Drake equation to estimate the number of habitable planets in the Galaxy.

Sara Seager was the principle investigator of the Asteria spacecraft, a 6-U cubesat designed to do precision photometry to search for extrasolar planets, a collaborative project between MIT and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In 2020, Sara Seager led a team proposing a mission Venus Life Finder, a small spacecraft to investigate the possibility of life in the atmosphere of Venus.

Sara Seager was appointed as a fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012 and elected to the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada as an honorary member in 2013.

Sara Seager was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.

Sara Seager was the Elizabeth R Laird Lecturer at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2018.

On 19 August 2020 Sara Seager appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast.

Sara Seager won the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Science and Technology Prize for The Smallest Lights in the Universe.