2026 Early Alumni Excellence Award Recipient
Dr. Emily Pass
BSc ’19, Physics and Astronomy
Dr. Emily Pass is a Juan Carlos Torres Postdoctoral Fellow in exoplanet research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an incoming Assistant Professor at the Université de Montréal. She is an observational astronomer and stellar astrophysicist working to uncover how the most common stars in the universe are different from our Sun, and how their solar systems are different from our own. Through this research, she seeks to shed light on the age-old question that has sparked the human imagination for generations: is there life elsewhere in the universe?
She leads projects using cutting-edge, highly competitive facilities, including the James Webb Space Telescope and some of the largest telescopes here on Earth, and has published eleven scientific papers as first author. During her time as a PhD student at Harvard University, she was a Peirce Fellow and NSERC Postgraduate Scholar, and her thesis was awarded the 2024 Fireman Prize. She has also been recognized as one of Forbes 30 under 30 in the field of science.