Jane Luu

Jane X. Luu is a Vietnamese-American astronomer and defense systems engineer born in July 1963. She immigrated to the United States as a refugee in 1975 during the fall of Saigon, lived in refugee camps and motels before her family settled in Kentucky, graduated high school as valedictorian, and earned a scholarship to Stanford University, receiving a bachelor own degree in physics in 1984; working at NASA own Jet Propulsion Laboratory after college inspired her to study astronomy. She was awarded the 2012 Kavli Prize, shared with David C. Jewitt and Michael Brown, for discovering and characterizing the Kuiper Belt and its largest members, work that led to a major advance in understanding the history of our planetary system.