Nora Eisner is a PhD student at the University of Oxford where her research focuses on citizen-powered exoplanet discoveries using NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) data. She is also the project leader of the citizen science project Planet Hunters TESS, which is hosted by the Zooniverse platform. By harnessing the power of citizen-science, she searches for transit events in the TESS data that were missed by the main detection pipelines and other teas of professional astronomers, while engaging tens of thousands of citizen-scientists in the exciting task of finding planets. This work also makes use of machine learning to identify the most promising exoplanet candidates, which she then follows up using ground based telescopes. Nora is a strong advocate for open source software and for promoting science to the wider community.
Prior to working on exoplanets, Nora completed her Master's degree at the University of Sheffield with a year in the USA at the University fo Maryland College Park. Her work at these institutions was focused on the observation and analysis of comet nuclei.