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Smadar Naoz

Smadar Naoz is an Israeli-American astrophysicist who studies cosmology and planetary dynamics and won the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy in 2015.

born 1978Research on the first galaxiesDynamics of hot Jupiter planets2015 Annie Jump Cannon Award

Occupation: astrophysicist, physicist
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University

Smadar Naoz was born in 1978 in Jerusalem

Smadar Naoz was born in 1978 in Jerusalem and grew up there. Her interest in astrophysics began as a child, when she watched Star Trek with her mother and younger sister.

She earned a bachelor's degree in physics in 2002 and a master's degree in 2004 at the Racah Institute of the Hebrew University. She completed her PhD at Tel Aviv University in 2010, with research on the first generation of galaxies.

After her PhD she held a Gruber postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University's CIERA center. In 2012 she became an Einstein Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She later joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, as an assistant professor.

Her early research dealt with how the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang. She later studied the dynamical evolution of hot Jupiter planets and published a paper on the subject in Nature.