Jane Luu

Jane Luu (a.k.a. Jane X. Luu) is a Vietnamese American astronomer. Luu was born in 1963 in South Vietnam to a father who worked as a translator for the U.S. Army. Her father taught her French as a child, beginning her lifelong love of languages. Luu immigrated to the United States as a refugee in 1975, when the South Vietnamese government fell. She and her family settled in Kentucky, where she had relatives. A visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory inspired her to study astronomy. She attended Stanford University, receiving her bachelor's degree in 1984. As a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she worked with David C. Jewitt to discover the Kuiper Belt. In 1992,...