I’m a 51 Pegasi b Fellow at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Previously, I did my PhD in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, working with Josh Winn. If you are a student interested in working with me, please reach out!

My research interests are in understanding Hot Jupiters – giant planets like Jupiter in our own solar system, but which orbit much closer to their stars, taking just a few days to make a complete orbit. In comparison, Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun in our solar system, takes 88 days to go around once. So these planets are among the hottest worlds in the universe! These extreme planets have many peculiarities, with many having “inflated radii” – appearing larger than we would expect from their masses, as well as having strong winds that blow around the planet at many hundreds of miles per hour. Recently, we even found that the planet WASP-12b has an orbit that is decaying, and will crash into its star in just a few million years.

Hot Jupiters were the first kind of exoplanet to be found, with the discovery of 51 Peg b (for which the discoverers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2019). They came as a surprise to most astronomers, as it was thought that no planet could form so close to its star. More than two decades later, how exactly these planets came to be remains a mystery. It’s likely that they formed further out and migrated inward, but we would like to understand how exactly they did so.

Over the past few years, I have been building up a census of the closest hot Jupiters in order to study their demographics, with the goal of using the distribution of their properties to learn how these planets formed. Although hot Jupiters are relatively easy to find, due to their large mass and short orbits, it turns out they are pretty rare, occurring around less than 1% of stars, Previously known hot Jupiters came from a variety of surveys, resulting in a heterogeneous sample. Fortunately, NASA’s TESS mission is conducting an all-sky search for transiting planets, and we expect that it will find hundreds of new hot Jupiters, which when combined with previous discoveries, will enable a homogeneous study of this population of planets. I use a variety of telescopes around the world to confirm and characterize the planets discovered by TESS, and our survey has already confirmed more than 60 new hot Jupiters. Stay tuned for updates on the demographic results!

Before graduate school at Princeton, I completed my undergraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology, majoring in Physics with a minor in Planetary Science. Even before that, I was born and grew up in sunny Singapore, a cosmopolitan and urban city-state with some of the most diverse food in the world. Home is the constant bustle and bright lights of the city, the smoke of a barbecue on the beach, the cacophony of sounds at a hawker centre. But since moving to the United States, I’ve also come to appreciate the value in taking a quiet moment out in nature, experiencing the vast opennness, fresh air, and starry night skies.