Emily Leiner
- Assistant Professor of Physics
Emily Leiner is an Assistant Professor at Illinois Institute of Technology and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Exploration in Astrophysics (CIERA) at Northwestern University. Previously she was a National Science Foundation Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow (2018–2021) and CIERA Fellow (2021-2022) at Northwestern University. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin– Madison in 2018. She is interested in studying the outcomes of evolution in binary star systems. These binary stars can transfer material between each other or merge into single objects, creating unusual looking stars or explosive events. She studies these binary interactions using both observational and computational approaches. Her work uses data from many premier space-based and ground-based observing facilities including Gaia, Kepler/K2, TESS, and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Education
Ph.D. Astronomy, University of Wisconsin— Madison, 2018
Professional Affiliations & Memberships
- American Astronomical Society
- LSST Discovery Alliance
Publications
Expertise
Binary evolution modeling, stellar spectroscopy, the physics of mass transfer, asteroseismology, stellar angular momentum evolution, and observational studies of star clusters.
