Professor, Planetary Sciences | Professor, Applied Mathematics - GIDP | Regents Professor, Lunar and Planetary Laboratory | Member of the Graduate Faculty | Professor, Louise Foucar Marshall Science Research | Professor, Aerospace-Mechanical Engineering | Regents Professor, Planetary Sciences
Renu Malhotra is Louise Foucar Marshall Science Research Professor and Regents' Professor of Planetary Sciences at The University of Arizona in Tucson, where she is also serving as Chair of the Theoretical Astrophysics Program. She was born in New Delhi and grew uin Hyderabad, India. She earned her M.S. in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi in 1983, and her Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University in 1988. She did post-doctoral research at Cornell and at Caltech, and worked as a staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. Her work in planetary dynamics hasned a wide variety of topics, including extra-solar planets and debris disks around nearby stars, the formation and evolution of the Kuiper belt and the asteroid belt, the orbital resonances amongst the moons of the giant planets, and the meteoritic bombardment history of the planets. She has revolutionized our understanding of the history of the solar system by using the orbital resonance between Pluto and Neptune to infer large-scale orbital migration of the giant planets and to predict the existence of the Plutinos" and other small planets in resonance with Neptune. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been the recipient of honors and awards from the American Astronomical Society, the International Astronomical Union, The University of Arizona, and the IIT-Delhi.