Gabriele Betancourt-Martinez is a program officer for the Science program at the Heising-Simons Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation in 2021, Gabriele was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP) in Toulouse, France. There, she was part of a team that built a laboratory test platform for the cryogenic detection and readout chain for the X-ray Integral Field Unit of the Athena space telescope. She was also work package lead for a large European grant, coordinating and representing laboratory astrophysics research across four different institutions. Prior to working at IRAP, she was a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. At Goddard, she tested and developed X-ray microcalorimeter spectrometer detectors for astrophysics. She also used them in laboratories to benchmark and improve spectral models that describe atomic processes that occur in astrophysical plasmas. Gabriele received the American Physical Society’s 2018 Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Doctoral Dissertation Award in Astrophysics for this work. She earned her Ph.D. and master’s degree in astronomy from the University of Maryland, College Park, and has a bachelor’s degree in astronomy and physics from Yale University.