Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy NSF CAREER Award Sloan Fellowship Heather A. Knutson is an astrophysicist and professor of planetary science at California Institute of Technology in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences.

In 2016, she was referred to in Popular Science as "the first exoplanet meteorologist, determining the local temperature, weather, and even composition of the atmosphere".

[2] As an undergraduate in the physics department of Johns Hopkins University, Knutson worked part-time as an intern with the Space Telescope Science Institute.

She completed her Ph.D. in astronomy there in 2009 upon successful defense of her thesis, entitled Portraits of distant worlds: Characterizing the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.

[4][5] Following completion of her doctorate, Knutson worked for two years as a Miller Institute postdoctoral fellow in the department of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley.