Exoplanet science is an explosive new field catalyzed by the discovery of over 4000 exoplanets via the NASA Kepler and TESS missions. The field will continue to evolve rapidly over the next several decades as we push observational techniques toward the discovery of Earth-like planets. Along the way, we will learn about diverse types of planets, their interior and atmospheric compositions, their orbital properties, the systems in which they reside, and how the planets and their systems form and change over time. I will discuss my past, present, and future experiments with observational astronomy to address these topics.
Dr. Lauren Weiss is the Beatrice Watson Parrent Fellow at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Previously, she was the Trottier Fellow at the University of Montreal.
Her education was at the University of California, Berkeley (PhD, 2016) the University of Cambridge (MPhil, 2011), and Harvard University (BA, 2010) Dr. Weiss’s work focuses on measurements of fundamental exoplanet properties. She is the Principal Investigator of a NASA-Keck Key Mission Support program and is a leader within the California Planet Search team.