Rebecca Oppenheimer

Rebecca Oppenheimer
Residence	U.S.
Fields	Chemistry, Materials science
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley American Museum of Natural History
Education	Horace Mann School
Alma mater	Columbia University California Institute of Technology
Known for	astrophysics

Rebecca Oppenheimer (born Ben R. Oppenheimer) is an American astrophysicist and one of three curators in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Oppenheimer attended the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. After graduating in 1990, she attended Columbia University, where she was an I. I. Rabi Science Scholar. She received a BSc in Physics from Columbia in 1994. In 1999 she was granted a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology and spent the following two years at the University of California at Berkeley on a Hubble Space Telescope Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.

Oppenheimer holds an adjunct professorship at Columbia University's Department of Astronomy and has published over one hundred research and public-oriented science articles. She is co-discoverer of the first brown dwarf, Gliese 229B, and is active in research on exoplanets,white dwarfs,adaptive optics and coronagraphy. Oppenheimer serves on NASA,NSF and NRC committees. She is the principal investigator for Project 1640, an exoplanet imaging project.