My name is Lauren Ilsedore Cleeves (Ilse), and I am an Assistant Professor of Astronomy jointly appointed in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Virginia.

 

I arrived in Fall 2018 from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Harvard Institute for Theory and Computation, where I was a Hubble Fellow at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in the Radio and Geoastronomy Division from 2015-2018. Previously, I did my PhD at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor advised by Ted Bergin. I received a B.S. in Physics with a concentration in Astrophysics from Rice University in Houston, TX in 2009. 

 

My research focuses on understanding the molecular and physical origins of planetary systems such as our own.  By using clues from interstellar molecular emission, I study young planetary systems in formation around low-mass stars, i.e. protoplanetary disks: the very materials from which planets, comets, and other solar system bodies eventually form. 

 

While I focus on the theoretical modeling of these systems, my work is guided by observational results from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, the Submillimeter Array as well as the Herschel Space Observatory.  In addition to clues from the astronomical data, our group furthermore endeavors to connect all scales by incorporating our knowledge of the primitive solar nebula from the cometary and meteoritic record.