Karin I. Öberg

In her role as Senior Vice Provost for Faculty, Karin I. Öberg serves as Harvard’s central leader for faculty affairs, coordinating University-wide efforts to recruit and retain outstanding scholars, advance their research and teaching, and support their work-life balance. Working closely with the Schools, deans, and relevant offices, she also coordinates the review of academic appointments, helping to ensure excellence across the faculty ranks. She advances Harvard’s mission through the conviction that a flourishing faculty, free to pursue academic excellence, lies at the heart of the University.

Öberg also serves as the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences and Professor of Astronomy. An astrochemist, she studies how chemical processes govern the formation and composition of young planets as they coalesce in the disks of dust and gas surrounding newly forming stars, and how those processes bear on the habitability of nascent worlds. Her work spans laboratory experiments that recreate the exotic chemistry of space, astrochemical modeling, and astronomical observation, and has been published in more than 250 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Öberg’s research has been recognized with many of her field’s leading honors, including the Packard Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the American Astronomical Society’s Newton Lacy Pierce Prize, and a Simons Investigator Award in Astrophysics. In 2024 she received the Barry Prize for Distinguished Intellectual Achievement from the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, of which she is a member. She was also invited to deliver the Max Planck Society’s Harnack Lecture.

Öberg joined Harvard in 2009 as a Hubble Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She joined the astronomy faculty in 2013, was named Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor in Astronomy in 2016, and was promoted to full professor in 2017. She holds a B.Sc. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in astronomy from Leiden University.

Öberg has an extensive record of institutional service. Within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, she has served as director of undergraduate studies in astronomy, as a member of the Faculty Council, and on the Committee on Appointments and Promotions. She has contributed to University-wide efforts on academic culture through the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group and the University Faculty Advisory Council. Beyond Harvard, she serves on the governing board of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and as a trustee and vice chair of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome. She is also a prominent public voice on the relationship between science and religion.

To learn more about Professor Öberg’s research and scholarly work, visit her faculty webpage.