Malena Rice

Malena Rice joins Yale University as Assistant Professor in the Department of Astronomy. Her research centers on the formation and evolution of planetary systems, drawing from both the detailed evidence within the solar system and the broader, multivariate evidence provided by the thousands of known extrasolar systems. Her recent work has focused on constraining the most prominent formation pathways for hot Jupiter exoplanets, developing machine learning tools to characterize the compositional properties of extrasolar systems, and leading a search for the most distant solar system bodies. Rice received her Ph.D. (2022), M.Phil. (2020), and M.S. (2020) in Astronomy from Yale University, as well as her B.A. degrees in Physics and Astrophysics (2017) from UC Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Yale, she spent one year as a 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.