Lisa Kaltenegger, associate professor in the Department of Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded the 2025 Carl Sagan Medal by the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society.
The award recognizes and honors outstanding communication by an active planetary scientist to the public. The prize will be presented in September at a joint meeting of the DPS and the Europlanet Society Congress in Helsinki, Finland.
In a statement, the prize committee said Kaltenegger’s efforts “have significantly contributed to a public understanding of, and enthusiasm for, planetary science. Throughout her career, Kaltenegger has made communication and engagement a priority … she has worked hard to ensure that her outstanding contributions to the fields of planetary and exoplanetary science be accessible to general audiences as well as scientists.”
“Carl Sagan was dedicated to the public understanding and popularization of science and his legacy of public outreach is alive and well in the College of Arts and Sciences,” said Peter John Loewen, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences. “Professor Kaltenegger has followed in Sagan’s footsteps and this well-deserved award recognizes her commitment to and success in conveying the excitement and wonder of science.”
The committee cited her work as founding director of Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute, with its extensive public outreach, including a YouTube channel showcasing technical and popular science talks with more than 26,000 subscribers. The committee also called Kaltenegger “a gifted communicator” who has appeared on numerous high-profile media outlets and podcasts. She recently published the critically acclaimed popular science book, “Alien Earths,” which has been translated into 10 languages.
“Sharing the wonders of the cosmos with the public is a privilege and delight, and it has allowed me to meet so many outstanding people,” Kaltenegger said. “I am deeply honored and humbled to receive this award that carries Carl’s name. He still inspires me.”
Kaltenegger, an expert in modeling habitable worlds and their “light fingerprints,” has spent the last decade finding new ways to spot life in the cosmos, working with NASA and the European Space Agency on missions to find habitable planets. Kaltenegger has pioneered modeling light fingerprints (spectra) of Earth through geological times, showing what changes telescopes could spot on a changing habitable world, from a young Earth to our modern world. She also identified approximately 1,000 stars that could see Earth dim the Sun from their vantage point and spot us as aliens – if anyone were looking.
Her team models how to identify signs of life on habitable worlds orbiting different colored stars and stellar remnants. Their research includes modeling lava world equivalents in the lab to help figure out what such exoplanets would look like from Earth, and growing biota from diverse environments to create a color catalog of life. So far, the catalog includes more than 250 biopigment measurements of a wide range of biota that could be identified on worlds circling other stars; the team has also used AI to develop strategies to find these colors on other worlds with the next generation of telescopes.
Kaltenegger’s other awards include the Heinz Meier Leibnitz Prize for Physics of Germany; the Doppler Prize for Innovation in Science of Austria; the Barry-Jones Inauguration Award of the Royal Astrobiology Society and Open University in Britain; and the Beatrice Tinsley Lecturer of the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand. She was named one of America’s Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine, an Innovator to Watch by TIME Magazine, and was selected as one of the European Commission’s Role Models for Women in Science and Research.
Past winners of the Carl Sagan Medal include Steve Squyres ’78, Ph.D. ’81, professor emeritus in astronomy, who now serves as chief scientist for the private aerospace company Blue Origin.
Linda B. Glaser is news and media relations manager for the College of Arts and Sciences.