Gabriele Betancourt-Martinez
Gabriele Betancourt-Martinez is a program officer in the Science program at the Heising-Simons Foundation. In this role, she helps shape and administer the Foundation’s portfolio to enable fundamental scientific research and to strengthen the fields of astronomy, physics, and climate change science through grants and targeted programming.
Prior to joining the Foundation, Gabriele was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP) in Toulouse, France. There, she was part of a team that built a laboratory test platform for the cryogenic detection and readout chain for the X-ray Integral Field Unit of the Athena space telescope. She was also work package lead for a large European grant, coordinating and representing laboratory astrophysics research across four different institutions. Prior to working at IRAP, she was a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. At Goddard, she tested and developed X-ray microcalorimeter spectrometer detectors for astrophysics. She also used them in laboratories to benchmark and improve spectral models that describe atomic processes that occur in astrophysical plasmas. Gabriele received the American Physical Society's 2018 Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Doctoral Dissertation Award in Astrophysics for this work.
She earned her Ph.D. and master’s degree in astronomy from the University of Maryland, College Park, and has a bachelor’s degree in astronomy and physics from Yale University. In her spare time, she enjoys swimming, biking, and running (occasionally all together and in that order), and enjoying the trails near her home in Pacifica, CA.
