Professor Schlichting is a theorist and observer in planetary astrophysics who works primarily on understanding planetary origins. She received her PhD from Caltech in 2009, and following a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship in residence at UCLA, she obtained a faculty position at MIT in 2013. She has recently come back to UCLA as Associate Professor in EPSS. She has won numerous awards in her young career, including the naming of asteroid 9522 Schlichting by the International Astronomical Union.