Jean-Michel Désert is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam. After completing his PhD in Exoplanet atmospheres at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (France) in 2009, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard College Observatory (USA) to work on NASA’s Kepler mission, and became a Carl Sagan fellow at Caltech (USA). In 2013, he went on an Assistant Professor position at the University of Colorado Boulder (USA) before joining the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy in 2015. He is a NWO-TOPII and ERC Starting Grant Laureate.
Jean-Michel works on detecting and characterizing the atmospheres of planets orbiting nearby stars, and teaches Planetary Sciences to bachelor students. The main goal of his research is to answer key questions about the formation and evolution of exoplanets, and to explain the origin and characteristics of our Solar System and the Earth. The most important component of his work focuses on studying exoplanet’s atmospheres to learn about their composition and overall physical properties. He conducts comparative exoplanetology observational programs (e.g., HST, Spitzer, Kepler, VLT). Ultimately, his work provides pioneering techniques that will be used to characterize potentially habitable exoplanets with future capabilities such as JWST and Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs).
Exoplanets, Exoplanet atmospheres, Planetary sciences, Star and planet formation.