Rebecca Oppenheimer is an American astrophysicist and one of four curator/professors in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) on Manhattan 's Upper West Side. Oppenheimer is a comparative exoplanetary scientist. She investigates planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Her optics laboratory is the birthplace of a number of new astronomical instruments designed to tackle the problem of directly seeing and taking spectra of nearby solar systems with exoplanets and studying their composition, with the ultimate goal of finding life outside the solar system.