STScI Director Jennifer Lotz Elected AAAS Fellow
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has elected Dr. Jennifer Lotz, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, and 448 other AAAS members as Fellows of the AAAS. Election as an AAAS Fellow is a lifetime honor bestowed upon select AAAS members by their peers for their efforts to advance science or its applications.
Dr. Lotz is being honored for distinguished leadership and scientific contributions to astronomy, particularly insights learned about the early universe from gravitational lensing observed by the groundbreaking Hubble Frontier Fields program. Frontier Fields, a large observing program by the Hubble Space Telescope that Lotz led from 2012 to 2016, took very deep images of six galaxy clusters to reveal extremely distant galaxies and help reconstruct the history of the universe.
Dr. Lotz became STScI director in 2024. Prior to this, she served as director of the International Gemini Observatory from 2018 to 2024.
Hallmarks of Dr. Lotz’s career are her contributions to and leadership of large science teams that pursue answers to big questions about the universe. Currently, she is a member of the James Webb Space Telescope’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS) and Next Generation Deep Extragalactic Exploratory Public (NGDEEP) survey. In addition to leading Hubble’s Frontier Fields program earlier in her career, she was also a member of the telescope’s Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS). She has pioneered the use of realistic numerical simulations of galaxies to interpret deep Hubble and Webb images.
The newly elected Fellows will receive an official certificate and a gold and blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin. The recipients will be honored at the annual Fellows Forum in Washington, D.C. on May 29, 2026.
Past AAAS Fellows from STScI include Drs. Carol Christian, Kathryn Flanagan, Colin Norman, Massimo Stiavelli, Nancy Levenson, David Soderblom, Margaret Meixner, and Mario Livio.
The Space Telescope Science Institute is expanding the frontiers of space astronomy by hosting the science operations center of the Hubble Space Telescope, the science and mission operations centers for the James Webb Space Telescope, and the science operations center for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. STScI also houses the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) which is a NASA-funded project to support and provide to the astronomical community a variety of astronomical data archives, and is the data repository for the Hubble, Webb, Roman, Kepler, K2, TESS missions and more. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.