Sarah T. Stewart-Mukhopadhyay is an American planetary scientist known for studying planet formation, planetary geology, and materials science. She is a professor at the University of California, Davis in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department. She was a professor at Harvard University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences from 2003 to 2014.
Stewart-Mukhopadhyay was named as one of the "Brilliant 10" by Popular Science in 2010, one of "Astronomy's Rising Stars" by Astronomy in 2013, and one of the "Top 100 Science Stories of 2015" in Discover. She received an award from the American Astronomical Society for outstanding achievements by a young scientist. She won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2018.
Stewart-Mukhopadhyay received her undergraduate degree in astrophysics and physics from Harvard in 1995. She completed her PhD at the California Institute of Technology in 2002.
Stewart-Mukhopadhyay is director of the Shock Compression Laboratory. At Caltech, she was the first to study shock propagation in ice under similar conditions found in the Solar System. Her research group is interested in planetary formation, particularly with giant impacts and impact cratering.
She was awarded the Urey Prize in 2009. Her work on shock-induced ice melting helped to show that liquid water is the most erosive fluid currently at work on the surface of Mars.
One of the tools at the Shock Compression Laboratory is a 40 mm cannon. The shock lab has been located at UC Davis since 2016. Her group also does experiments at the Z Machine at Sandia National Laboratory to study shock-induced vaporization.
Stewart-Mukhopadhyay proposed a version of the giant impact hypothesis in which an oblate Earth was slowed from a 2.3-hour long day, and allowed to become spherical, by an impact with the planet Theia.
In 2018 Simon J. Lock, Sarah Stewart-Mukhopadhyay, et al. hypothesized a new kind of astronomical object â a synestia â and proposed a new model of how the Earth and Moon were formed.
Stewart was born in Taiwan, where her father was stationed in the Air Force. Stewart's husband, Sujoy Mukhopadhyay, is also a professor and planetary scientist at UC Davis.