Royal Society Fellowship success

Congratulations to astronomer Dr Cyrielle Opitom who has been awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.

The Royal Society has announced 37 successful University Research Fellowship candidates for 2021. The scheme supports scientists who are in the early stages of their research path to build their career and pursue cutting-edge scientific research.

Dr Opitom is based in the School’s Institute for Astronomy. Her research focuses on looking at the composition of comets to learn about the early solar system and how it was formed. Comets are some of the most pristine relics of planetary formation, and their nuclei preserve invaluable clues about the conditions at the time of their formation. She will compare the composition of solar system comets to interstellar objects formed in very different environments. She will combine new observations of comets at large distances, re-analyse existing data and use multi-wavelength and multi-technique observations.

Dr Cyrielle Opitom Cyrielle obtained her PhD in Astronomy at the Université de Liège in Belgium in 2016 and then moved to Chile as a fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO). She has worked at the University of Edinburgh since 2019.