Tereasa Brainerd Elected Fellow of the American Astronomical Society

By Hariri Institute Staff

Tereasa Brainerd, professor of astronomy at the Boston University College of Arts and Sciences, has been named a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the largest professional organization of astronomers in the USA.

Inductions into each class of Fellows is limited to at most 0.5% of the membership in any given year. The AAS committee elected Brainerd for this honor  due to Brainerd’s “pioneering work in the use of weak gravitational lensing to measure the structure of individual galaxies; significant service to the Society in committee roles and on the Board of Trustees; and leading the Institute for Astrophysical Research and the Department of Astronomy at Boston University to a significant expansion in research in observational astronomy.”

“It’s an incredible honor to be named a Fellow of the AAS,” Brainerd says. “The AAS is the largest professional association of astronomers in the USA. In addition to hosting conferences, the AAS publishes some of the world’s most impactful astronomy journals and advocates for astronomical science at the federal level, focusing on policy making that impacts funding for astronomy research and education, as well as regulations and policies that impact astronomy as a profession. I’ve been a proud AAS member for over 30 years, and I’m deeply humbled by this truly special recognition by my colleagues.”

Brainerd is an expert on satellite galaxies as probes of dark matter halos, weak gravitational lensing, intrinsic alignments of galaxies, galaxy clustering, and numerical simulations of structure formation. Her current research at BU includes studies of the spatial and velocity distributions of satellite galaxies and comparisons of observed properties of galaxies to the properties of galaxies in large simulations.

Learn more about Dr. Brainerd’s work here.