Konstantin Batygin

Konstantin Batygin
Konstantin Batygin at Caltech in January 2016
Born	(1986-03-23) March 23, 1986 (age 31) Moscow, RSFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality	American
Fields	Planetary astronomy
Education	University of California, California Institute of Technology
Known for	Planet Nine
Spouse	Olga A. Batygin (née Mishina)
Children	A daughter (born 2012)
Website http://web.gps.caltech.edu/~kbatygin

Konstantin Batygin (Russian: Константи́н Юрьевич Батыгин) is an Russian-American astronomer and Assistant Professor of Planetary Sciences at Caltech. He is on the 2015 Forbes list of 30 scientists under 30 who are changing the world, and has been named one of the "brilliant 10" people of 2016 by Popular Science magazine.

Konstantin Batygin was born in Moscow, Soviet Union. His father, Yuri Konstantinovich Batygin, worked as an accelerator physicist in the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute until 1994, when he moved along with his wife Galina and their family to Wakō, Japan, and began working at the particle accelerator facility in RIKEN. There, Konstantin graduated from a public Japanese elementary school, later on attending a Russian embassy-based school and studying the martial art Gōjū-ryū.

In late 1999, at age 13, Konstantin Batygin moved to Morgan Hill, California along with his family. Upon graduating from high school, he chose to attend the University of California, Santa Cruz for the beach and the chance to keep playing in his rock band, The Seventh Season. During his sophomore year as an undergraduate at the university, he met Gregory P. Laughlin at a departmental party, and afterwards they began working together on the Solar System’s long-term dynamical evolution. In June 2008, he graduated from UCSC with a bachelor's degree in astrophysics, and won the Loren Steck Award for his thesis, "The Dynamical Stability of the Solar System". Batygin subsequently went on to pursue graduate studies at Caltech, obtaining a Ph.D. in Planetary Science in 2012.