Rebecca Oppenheimer

Rebecca Oppenheimer is an American astrophysicist and one of three curators in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Oppenheimer is a comparative exoplanetary scientist. She investigates planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Her optics laboratory is the birthplace of a number of new astronomical instruments designed to tackle the problem of directly seeing and taking spectra of nearby solar systems with the ultimate goal of finding life outside the solar system.
Early life and education.
Oppenheimer attended the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. After graduating in 1990, she attended Columbia University, where she was an I. I. Rabi Science Scholar. She received a BSc in Physics from Columbia in 1994. In 1999 she was granted a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology and spent the following two years at the University of California at Berkeley on a Hubble Space Telescope Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. 
Career.
Oppenheimer holds an adjunct professorship at Columbia University's Department of Astronomy and has published over one hundred research and public-oriented science articles. She is co-discoverer of the first brown dwarf, Gliese 229B, and is active in research on exoplanets, white dwarfs, adaptive optics and coronagraphy. Oppenheimer serves on NASA, NSF and NRC committees. She is the principal investigator for Project 1640, an exoplanet imaging project.
In 2001, she moved back to New York City to conduct research at the American Museum of Natural History, where she joined the faculty in 2004. Oppenheimer regularly gives public and professional lectures on astronomical research.
She is an active member of the International Astronomical Union. She is a member of the A,B,C,D,F, and G affiliations within the IAU. 
Personal life.
Oppenheimer is a trans woman and was featured in a "New York Times" piece where she wrote about being transgender and a scientist.