Dr. Lucian Walkowicz is an astronomer, movement artist, and educator based in Chicago. Walkowicz’s work embraces a wide scope of questions related to life in the universe, including the effects of stellar magnetism on planetary habitability and exoplanet detection, the use of unsupervised machine learning for identifying SETI candidate signals, and the ethical and social impacts of space exploration. They have worked on numerous missions and projects in their 25+ years in astronomy, including NASA’s Kepler Mission, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Asteroid 205599 Walkowicz is named in honor of their contributions to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. 

Walkowicz holds a BS in Physics and Astronomy from Johns Hopkins University, an MS and PhD in Astronomy from the University of Washington. They held the Kepler Fellowship for the Study of Planet-Bearing Stars at UC Berkeley and the Henry Norris Russell Fellowship at Princeton, before becoming an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in 2014. Walkowicz served as the 5th Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/LOC Chair in Astrobiology, where they convened and curated several interdisciplinary gatherings ("Decolonizing Mars" and "Becoming Interplanetary") to help coalesce the many voices clamoring for more equitable space futures. In 2018, they co-founded the JustSpace Alliance to continue the work stemming from their time at the Library. Walkowicz is also the founder of the LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program, an initiative to provide astronomy graduate students with training in advanced computing, now celebrating its tenth year. They currently do their research and writing as part of the JustSpace Alliance, and teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.