Debra A. Fischer is a professor of astronomy

Astronomy

Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...

 at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. Fischer has co-authored over 100 papers on dwarf

Dwarf star

The term dwarf star refers to a variety of distinct classes of stars.* Dwarf star alone generally refers to any main sequence star, a star of luminosity class V.** Red dwarfs are low-mass main sequence stars....

 and sub-stellar mass objects in the galactic neighborhood, including many on extrasolar planets. She is a principal investigator with the N2K Consortium

N2K Consortium

The N2K Consortium is a collaborative multinational effort by American, Chilean and Japanese astronomers to find additional extrasolar planets around stars that are...

 searching for exoplanets. She is also a member of the planet search team led by Geoffrey Marcy

Geoffrey Marcy

Geoffrey W. Marcy is an American astronomer, who is currently Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, famous for discovering more extrasolar planets than anyone else, 70 out of the first 100 to be discovered, along with R...

 looking for extrasolar planet

Extrasolar planet

An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet outside the Solar System. A total of such planets have been identified as of . It is now known that a substantial fraction of stars have planets, including perhaps half of all Sun-like stars...

s.

Debra Fischer received her PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1998.