Rate My Professor Annelies Mortier

Dr Annelies Mortier is an Associate Professor in Astronomy in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham, where she also serves as Director of School Culture. She holds a UKRI Future Leader Fellowship and is an observational astronomer specialising in the detection and characterisation of exoplanets and the study of stars, including Sun-as-a-star observations to understand stellar variability and its effects on radial velocity measurements. Her research examines the chemical connections between stars and their planets, primarily using data from the HARPS-N spectrograph, and she is a science team member of HARPS-N, PLATO, and PoET. Mortier has secured observing time on multiple ground- and space-based telescopes and contributes to international collaborations in exoplanet science.

She earned a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Porto in 2013, an MSci in Astronomy from the University of Leiden in 2010, and BMath and MMath degrees from the University of Ghent in 2006, along with an academic teacher’s qualification from Ghent in 2006. Her career includes roles as a high-school teacher in Belgium, postdoctoral researcher positions at the Universities of Porto and St Andrews, a lectureship in a widening participation programme at St Andrews during 2017–2018, and a senior Kavli Institute Fellowship at the University of Cambridge starting in 2018 before joining Birmingham as an assistant professor in 2022. She is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the European Astronomical Society, completed the Advance HE Aurora Women’s Leadership Development Programme in 2024, and has served on the OPTICON time allocation committee for four years (including as chair) and the NASA-NSF Working Group on Extremely Precise Radial Velocities for two years. Mortier teaches undergraduate courses in physics and astrophysics and supervises PhD students in exoplanet detection, radial velocity techniques, and stellar atmospheres.