Ben R. Oppenheimer (b. April 1972 in New York City) is an American astrophysicist and one of three curators in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Oppenheimer holds an adjunct professorship at Columbia University's Department of Astronomy and has published over one hundred research and public-oriented science articles. He is co-discoverer of the first brown dwarf, Gliese 229B,[1][2] and is active in research on exoplanets,[3] white dwarfs,[4] adaptive optics and coronagraphy.[5] Oppenheimer serves on NASA,[6] NSF and NRC committees.
Oppenheimer attended the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. After graduating in 1990, he attended Columbia University, where he was an I. I. Rabi Science Scholar. He received a BA in Physics from Columbia in 1994. In 1999 he was awarded a Ph. D. in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology and spent the following two years at the University of California at Berkeley on a Hubble Space Telescope Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. In 2001 he moved back to New York City to conduct research at the American Museum of Natural History. Oppenheimer regularly gives public and professional lectures on astronomical research.