Dr. Beatriz Villarroel is an assistant professor in astronomer at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm.
She has a Masters in Physics and PhD in Astronomy from Uppsala University and a collection peer-review papers in prestigious journals including The Astronomical Journal, Astrophysical Journal, Nature Physics, Acta Astronautica, and Nature Journal.
Dr. Villarroel is also the project leader of the Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project, along with the founded EXOPROBE project, aiming to find an extraterrestrial probe in the Solar System.
For her work with the VASCO project, she was awarded the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science national prize in Sweden 2021, the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Rising Talents prize in 2022. In 2023, she was awarded the Heterodox Academy’s Courage Prize. In 2023, she also gave a TEDx talk in Zurich with the title “Why we should search for alien artifacts”, and an invited talk at the Sol Foundation’s inaugural symposium at Stanford University. B.V. recently gave the Mitchell Lecture at Texas A&M. She likes classical music and playing violin in her free time.