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Jessica Lu received her undergraduate degree in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000. After working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley for three years, she returned to academia to pursue a PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles, which she completed in 2008. Following her PhD, she was awarded the Millikan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Observational Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. She also served as a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, joining the faculty there in 2013. In summer 2016, Lu became a faculty member at the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department. Her research interests include searching for free-floating stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way using gravitational microlensing and studying star formation within extreme environments. She is involved with various instrumentation projects to enhance adaptive optics in ground and space infrared astrometry. Lu works on projects such as the Thirty Meter Telescope and the ‘imaka project to correct image blurring due to atmospheric turbulence.
Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley • Berkeley, CA, USA
The Mathematics Subject GRE is required for the Fall 2026 admissions cycle. General GRE is optional.