Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil

Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil is a Turkish astrophysicist, an assistant professor at Dartmouth College in the United States. She is known for discovering an extremely rare double-ringed elliptical galaxy, PGC 1000714, which has been nicknamed "Burçin's Galaxy". The sources consulted give no birth date for her, and the museum records none. ¹

Born Burçin Mutlu, she was the first in her family to attend university. She studied at Beşiktaş Atatürk Anatolian High School and took her bachelor's degree at Bilkent University in 2009, then a master's degree at Texas Tech University in 2012 and a PhD at the University of Minnesota in 2017, under Marc Seigar. She held a postdoctoral post at the University of Arizona from 2017 to 2020 and an NSF/KICP fellowship at the University of Chicago, and in July 2022 she joined Dartmouth College as an assistant professor. ^{1 2}

During her doctoral work she identified the galaxy PGC 1000714, an elliptical galaxy with two complete stellar rings — a configuration so rare that the discovery, announced in 2017, drew wide attention, and the galaxy took her name in the press coverage. Her research since has used large survey data to study galaxy structure and evolution. ¹

She was named a TED Fellow in 2018 and a TED Senior Fellow in 2020. The English article describes her as a campaigner for the increased representation of Muslim women in science; the Turkish article's infobox records her religion as Islam, a single structured value that the museum notes in her data record without treating it, on its own, as a settled affiliation. ^{1 2}

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