Margaret Turnbull is an American astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution, Washington, DC. Turnbull is a NASA Astrobiology Institute postdoctoral research associate in the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Together with Jill Tarter she compiled HabCat (Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems) to help guide future projects in SETI and astrobiology aimed at finding life around other stars.

 

 

Earlier in her career, Turnbull was involved with the construction, setup, testing, and repair of detectors and readout system for an Antarctic Muon and Neutrino detector array. At the University of Wisconsin, she was involved in detector preparation for the X-ray Quantum Calorimeter sub-orbital launch experiment. At Lowell Observatory in Arizona, she participated in the examination of main-belt and Earth-crossing asteroid orbital parameters and trends of ephemeris uncertainty with orbital parameters. She has done Monte Carlo modeling of high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope images of protostars in the Taurus-Auriga dark cloud at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. And in the radio domain, she has analyzed large-scale HI 21 cm emission from Seyfert galaxies imaged by the Very Large Array, and conducted a search for obvious distortions caused by unseen companion galaxies.