| Isabelle Baraffe | |
| Workplaces: | University of Exeter École normale supérieure de Lyon Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics University of Göttingen |
| Alma Mater: | University of Göttingen |
| Thesis Title: | Evolution d'etoiles massives de faible metallicite et de metallicite nulle |
| Thesis Url: | https://theses.fr/1990PA077008 |
| Thesis Year: | 1997 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Jean Audouze |
Isabelle Baraffe is a French physicist who is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Exeter. Her research involves the development of new astrophysical models to understand low mass stars and exoplanets. She was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2010 and delivered the 2023 European Astronomical Society Lodewijk Woltjer Lecture.
Baraffe was born in France.[1] She completed her master's degree in physics at the Paris Diderot University. She remained there for her doctoral research, studying jointly at the University of Göttingen. Her research considered the evolution of non-metallic stars.[2] She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and the University of Göttingen.
Baraffe joined the École normale supérieure de Lyon.? She moved to the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon as a professor of astrophysics. In 2010, Baraffe joined the University of Exeter. Her research considers stellar hydrodynamics and exoplanets. Barafee has developed theoretical models to explore low mass stars and substellar objects, including brown dwarfs and exoplanets. The scientific community first became interested in low mass stars after the first report of brown dwarfs in 1995 (Gliese 229
She developed numerical tools that combine computational approaches with complex physics to study the dynamics of astrophysics. Her three-dimensional code MUSIC (MUlti-dimensional Stellar Implicit Code) can predict fundamental astrophysical processes and was awarded two European Research Council grants. She developed the field of asteroseismology – the use of pulsation modes to investigate the study of the inside of stars.