# Juliana Garcia-Mejia SAO Astrophysicist Harvard Lecturer in Astronomy ![ Juliana Garcia-Mejia headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum6286/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/2026-09/jgm_headshot_2026.png?itok=7PmXP8yX) email laptop\_windows [Professional Website](https://www.julianagarcia-mejia.com/) Juliana received her Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Harvard University in 2023 and returned to the Center for Astrophysics in 2026 after fellowships at MIT, where she was a 51 Pegasi b Fellow and a Pappalardo Fellow. She is an instrumentalist who builds precision instrumentation for the detection and characterization of exoplanets. She is Principal Investigator of the Tierras Observatory, a 1.3-meter robotic telescope at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory whose ultra-precise photometer enables studies of stellar variability and the search for temperate terrestrial planets around nearby M dwarfs, and she was opto-mechanical lead for proto-LightSpeed, a high-speed qCMOS imager and polarimeter commissioned at Magellan in 2025. Her current focus is establishing U.S. leadership in high-dispersion coronagraphy at Magellan, laying the groundwork for biosignature searches with the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Habitable Worlds Observatory. She also leads hands-on educational workshops in English and Spanish for students in underserved communities. Outside of work, she enjoys dabbling in a great many hobbies and getting good at none of them.