Kimberly Bott

I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Hawai`i, Hilo where I took part in the Akamai program and other excellent internship programs.  I received my PhD from the University of New South Wales under the advisement of Prof. Jeremy Bailey on exoplanet polarimetry (observation and computational modeling).  I returned to my home state and country to take a postdoc with Prof. Victoria Meadows at the University of Washington investigating the polarization of terrestrial worlds as part of the Virtual Planetary Laboratory and the Astrobiology program there.  Next, I took a postdoc with Prof. Stephen Kane at UC Riverside, which later turned into an Assistant Researcher appointment after I won a grant to continue investigations of terrestrial polarimetry (although I still worked with Prof. Kane on a project investigating the seasonal hazes of the Ice Giants). Recently, collaborators and I won another grant to extend our work to investigate the observability of terrestrial exoplanets in polarized light with contemporary and near-future telescopes, and how the method might be used to map them.