Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1989

Astronomer

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French astronomer Adeleine Caulet was born in Versailles, and grew up near Paris and in Reims. At the young age of 13, inspired both by the Apollo moon landings and by an interest in amateur telescope making, she had already decided to become an observational astronomer. Following studies at Paris and Marseille, including a thesis on ionized gas in the Large Magellanic Cloud, she continued her education in the U.S. She first worked on extragalactic astronomy with Gerard and Antoinette de Vaucouleurs at the University of Texas, and then moved on to the University of Chicago, where she obtained her Ph.D. in astronomy in 1989 with a thesis on quasar absorption line systems.

Postdoctoral work followed at the University of Alabama, and then at the Goddard Space Flight Center. At Goddard she developed ground-based telescope instrumentation, as well as working with the team that built the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), now installed into the Hubble Space Telescope.

In 1991, she returned to Europe to work with the European Space Agency (ESA) in Munich as an Instrument Scientist for HST. Since 1997, Adeleine has been a visiting scientist in several U.S. research centers, including the Space Telescope Science Institute and the University of Illinois.

She particularly enjoys travelling to and observing at ground-based observatories around the world, especially at favorite sites like Kitt Peak in Arizona, and La Silla in Chile. She has a wide variety of research interests, and likes to change her areas of concentration regularly. In addition to her instrumentation work, her research background includes studies of the interstellar gas and star formation; structure of emission nebulae like the Lagoon Nebula and the Carina Nebula; absorption lines in quasars; and compact dwarf galaxies.

When she is not doing astronomy, Adeleine likes to travel and back-pack in various exotic locales, including Antarctica, the deserts of Chile, and the volcanic regions of Hawaii.