Natalie Batalha is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California, Santa Cruz and former astrophysicist at NASA Ames Research Center and the project scientist for NASA's Kepler Mission. She holds a Bachelor's degree in physics from the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and a Doctoral degree in astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz. Batalha started her career as a stellar spectroscopist studying young, sun-like stars.

In 1999, Natalie joined the Kepler Mission and has contributed to many different aspects of the science, from studying the stars themselves to detecting and understanding the planets they harbor. Batalha led the analysis that yielded the discovery in 2011 of Kepler-10b—the mission's first confirmation of a rocky planet outside our solar system. And she led the effort to understand planet populations in the galaxy based on Kepler discoveries. In 2015, she joined the leadership team of a new NASA initiative dedicated to the search for evidence of life beyond the Solar System.