Lynne Anne Hillenbrand (born 1967) is an American astronomer whose research concerns the birth and aging of stars. She is a professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.[1]
Hillenbrand is originally from Bucks County, Pennsylvania,[2] where she was born in 1967.[3] After graduating from Council Rock High School in Bucks County in 1985, and from Princeton University in 1989, she became a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.[2] She completed her Ph.D. in 1995 with a dissertation on Herbig Ae/Be stars supervised by Stephen Strom.[4]
She became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1994 to 1997, and at the California Institute of Technology from 1997 to 2000.[2] She continued at Caltech as an assistant professor beginning in 2000. She was promoted to associate professor in 2006 and full professor in 2010.[1]
She chaired the US National Committee of the International Astronomical Union from 2014 to 2016.[5]
Hillenbrand was named as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in the 2023 class of fellows,[6] "for excellence in studying the youngest sun-like stars and for significant contributions to the 2010 Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey".[7]