Emily Pass

Emily is an observational astronomer focused on the study of M dwarfs, the smallest and most common type of star. Her research explores how these small stars differ from our Sun and the consequences for their attendant planets. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2024, where she was awarded the Fireman Prize for her thesis that probed the rotational/activity evolution of low-mass M dwarfs and the rarity of Jovian analogs in their planetary systems. Her work at MIT continues her quest to understand how stellar diversity sculpts exoplanet populations, with an eye not only to M dwarfs, but also to other axes of diversity such as chemical composition and thick-disk membership. To this end, she leads observing programs using some of the world’s premiere telescopes, including JWST, Gemini, and Magellan, and leverages big datasets from all-sky surveys like TESS and Gaia. Taken together, her research program strives to answer one unifying question: Is an Earth-like world possible around a star unlike our Sun?