Theodore Kareta, PhD

Theodore "Teddy" Kareta, Ph.D., is an expert on the Solar System's "small bodies" -- its comets, asteroids, and trans-Neptunian objects. His research spans from the origin of meteor showers to the behaviors of far-away comets to the study of potentially hazardous asteroids nearby. His work utilizes large ground- and space-based telescopes to measure the light emitted and reflected by these bodies to understand what they are made of and how they have changed since the time of their formation billions of years into the past.

Prior to joining Villanova, Dr. Kareta worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona where he played a key role in NASA's first planetary defense mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART. He has also was a part of the science teams for the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission and the European Space Agency (ESA)'s mission Rosetta. Throughout both his telescopic and spacecraft-related work, Dr. Kareta has successfully involved many students meaningfully in his research.

Dr. Kareta's research has increasingly focused on the study of the Interstellar Objects, comets and asteroids which formed around other stars before being tossed out and subsequently found rapidly passing through our own Solar System. He lead some of the earliest publications detailing ground-based telescopic characterizations of both the second and third of the interstellar objects, 2I/Borisov and 3I/ATLAS, and has been funded by NASA to study near-Earth object analogues to the Interstellar Objects closer to home.

From 2021 to 2025, Dr. Kareta was also the press officer for the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. He maintains both an interest in and a communication to thorough and effective communication of science to the public through all possible channels.