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Tereasa Brainerd

American astronomer

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 28, 2025
Entity authorityQ122682638
Source-derived summary

Tereasa Gail Brainerd (born 1964) is an American astronomer whose interests include galaxy clusters, satellite galaxies, and gravitational lensing. Educated in Canada and the US, she works in the US as a professor of astronomy at Boston University.

Education and career

Brainerd is the daughter of psychologist Charles Brainerd and audiologist Susan Haske. She was born in St. Johns, Michigan, in 1964, but moved to Edmonton, Alberta with her family as a child. She became an undergraduate at the University of Alberta, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1987. She went to Ohio State University for graduate study in astronomy, completing her Ph.D. in 1992. Her dissertation, A Study of Properties of Dark Galaxy Halos in a CDM Universe using N-body Simulations, was supervised by Jens Villumsen.

After postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology and Los Alamos National Laboratory, she joined the Boston University astronomy department faculty in 1995. She directed the Institute for Astrophysical Research from 2005 to 2011, and chaired the department from 2011 to 2015 and 2016 to 2018.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Tereasa Brainerd” as american astronomer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Tereasa, Brainerd and American.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1964, 1987, 1992, 1995—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1964-01-01. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Tereasa, Brainerd and American providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Tereasa Brainerd”, the useful work is to connect “american astronomer” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q122682638. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1964, 1987, 1992 and 1995.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Tereasa Brainerd” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.