Dr. Deidre Hunter

Astronomer, Lowell Observatory
Portrait of Deidre Hunter in front of a green background. She wears glasses and has short brown hair.
Hunter's Official Website

Deidre Hunter received her PhD in astrophysics at the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign in 1982. She received the 1984 Robert J. Trumpler Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for her dissertation on star formation in irregular galaxies. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Kitt Peak National Observatory, she spent two years at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution as the Richard B. Roberts Fellow, working with Dr. Vera Rubin. 

In 1986, Hunter joined the Lowell Observatory's science staff as well as the science team of the WFPC camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990. Her research centers on understanding star formation processes at very low densities and metallicities using nearby dwarf irregular galaxies. In 2014, Hunter received the American Astronomical Society's Education Prize for co-founding and running the Native American Astronomy Outreach Program.