Imke de Pater

Imke de Pater is a Dutch astronomer working at the University of California, Berkeley.

De Pater was introduced to astronomy in high school when a family friend gave her an astronomy textbook and introduced her to someone in Utrecht so she could learn about the field.

[1] She earned her Ph.D. from Leiden University (1980) while working on radio emissions from Jupiter.

In 2015 de Pater was named a fellow of the American Geophysical Union who cited her for:[4] far-seeing discoveries and cutting-edge visions of the dynamic outer solar system made from Earth at nearly every wavelength of light De Pater's research centers on observations of the large planets and their rings and satellites (Jupiter,[5][6] Neptune,[7] Titan,[8] and Uranus[9]) using adaptive optics and radio observations.

When the Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 collided with Jupiter in 1994, she led the campaign to observe the impact using the Keck Telescope[10][11][12][13] and the animations of the impact of the comet are readily available to the general public.

The rings of Uranus are shown here captured almost exactly edge-on to Earth. The observations were done by Daphne Stam (TU Delft) and Markus Hartung (ESO, Chile), in close collaboration with Mark Showalter (SETI) and Imke de Pater (UC Berkeley and TU Delft).