I’m a 51 Pegasi b Fellow studying the demographics and architectures of exoplanetary systems, with a particular focus on close-in giant planets. I have recently moved to the Division of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles, after having spent the first two years of my postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Please reach out to me at my new email address, which can be found in my CV, linked above. Previously, I did my PhD in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University, working with Josh Winn.

My research seeks to understand how planetary systems form, migrate, and evolve over cosmic time. I approach these questions in two complementary ways: by building well-defined samples of planets whose statistical properties can reveal broad trends, as well as by detailed characterization of individual planetary systems.

Much of my recent work has focused on 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! 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, and why not all Jovian planets become hot Jupiters.

To investigate hot Jupiters as a population, I initiated and led the TESS Grand Unified Hot Jupiter Survey. NASA’s TESS mission is conducting an all-sky search for transiting planets, allowing us to bring previously known planets and new discoveries into a single, uniformly selected sample. Using telescopes around the world and in collaboration with hundreds of scientists, I have confirmed and characterized more than 100 planets originally detected by TESS. This is not only allowing us to study their statistical distribution, but has also revealed rare sub-populations, including the enigmatic sub-Saturns: highly-inflated planets with Jupiter-like sizes but masses as low as Neptune; as well as hot Jupiters whose transits don’t recur like clockwork, showing large transit timing variations (TTVs) or transit duration variations (TDVs), revealing the presence of a nearby planet.

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.