Rebecca Smethurst

Rebecca Smethurst, widely recognized online as Dr. Becky, is a British astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. She works at the University of Oxford as a Royal Astronomical Society Research Fellow. Outside of her academic research into galactic evolution and supermassive black holes, she is best known for creating educational video content on astronomy and making complex scientific concepts accessible to the general public.

Smethurst attended the Bolton School Girls' Division from 1998 until 2008. She went on to study at the University of Durham, earning a first-class master's degree in physics and astronomy in 2012. After taking a year-long break from academia, she began her doctoral studies at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Chris Lintott. She earned her doctorate in 2017 following the completion of her thesis on galactic quenching histories and the environmental and morphological influences affecting them.

Smethurst started her research career as an Ogden Trust Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham before moving back to the University of Oxford in late 2018 as a junior research fellow. Her scientific work focuses on supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies and how they restrict or prevent star formation. Using statistical methodology, she evaluates large sets of observational data from projects like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Galaxy Zoo collaboration. She has developed open-source software tools for analyzing large astronomical datasets and showed that transitional "green valley" galaxies provide key insights into how star formation is suppressed.

Her outreach work began during her postdoctoral fellowship at Nottingham, where she appeared in video content for Sixty Symbols and Deep Sky Videos, two physics and astronomy projects created by Brady Haran. In late 2018, she created her own YouTube channel, Dr. Becky, featuring regular updates on astrophysics research, amateur stargazing topics, and a monthly segment called Night Sky News. She also co-hosts The Supermassive Podcast with journalist Izzie Clarke for the Royal Astronomical Society and has written the popular science books Space: 10 Things You Should Know and A Brief History of Black Holes.

Smethurst has received several accolades for her research and public engagement. In 2020, she was awarded both the Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship by the Herschel Society and Royal Astronomical Society and the Mary Somerville Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics. In 2022, the Royal Astronomical Society honored her with the Winton Award for her notable early-career achievements in post-doctoral astronomical research.

In July 2025, Smethurst publicly announced that she had received a diagnosis of early-stage breast cancer. In May 2026, she married her partner, Sam.