The talk will be about the needs for space and ground-based telescopes, and the technologies that make them possible. Half of the talk will focus on the James Webb Space Telescope, the most ambitious space telescope to date, and its successors. The other half will be about the largest ground-based telescopes (current and future).

Dr. Jane Luu got her BS in Physics from Stanford and PhD in Planetary Astronomy from MIT in 1992. After receiving her doctorate, Luu worked as a professor at Harvard University, since 1994.Luu also served as a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Following her time in Europe, Luu returned to the United States and works on instrumentation as a Senior Scientist at Lincoln Laboratory at MIT.

In 2012, she won (along with David C. Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles) the Shaw Prize “for their discovery and characterization of trans-Neptunian bodies, an archeological treasure dating back to the formation of the solar system and the long-sought source of short period comets” and the Kavli Prize (shared with Jewitt and Michael E. Brown) “for discovering and characterizing the Kuiper Belt and its largest members, work that led to a major advance in the understanding of the history of our planetary system”.

Honors, awards, and accolades:

• 1991 Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy
• 2012 Shaw Prize in Astronomy
• 2012 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics
• The asteroid 5430 Luu was named in her honor on 1 July 1996
• Fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

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