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David Charbonneau Named Professor of Astronomy at Harvard
Cambridge, Mass. - May 13, 2010 - David Charbonneau, an international leader in the search for planets orbiting stars other than our sun, has been named professor of astronomy at Harvard University.
Charbonneau was previously Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Astronomy at Harvard, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2004. He has also been director of undergraduate studies in Harvard's Department of Astronomy since 2008.
"Professor Charbonneau is an enormously influential scientist and a central figure in the search for exoplanets that has taken astronomy by storm over the last 15 years," says Jeremy Bloxham, dean of science in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "For all his skill as a scientist, he is no less adept in the classroom. He has reinvented Astronomy 16 as a gateway course for astronomy concentrators, and formulated a two-course sequence to provide a comprehensive overview of astrophysics. I am delighted, and I know our students are delighted, that he will continue to guide the renaissance in undergraduate astronomy education here at Harvard."
Charbonneau's primary research interests include the development of novel techniques for detecting and characterizing planets orbiting sun-like stars, known as exoplanets. Since the discovery of the first such planet in 1995, astronomers have identified more than 300 exoplanets, fueled in part by the quest for "habitable earths" orbiting stars other than our sun.
Charbonneau is particularly interested in planets in edge-on orbits, where the planet periodically passes in front of its star, offering unparalleled opportunities to determine the properties of the planet and its atmosphere. As a graduate student in 1999, he used a four-inch telescope to make the first detection of such an exoplanet, yielding the first-ever insights into the composition of a planet outside our solar system. He was a founding member of a survey that used a worldwide network of automated telescopes to survey hundreds of thousands of stars, ultimately detecting four new exoplanets.
Charbonneau has also pioneered the use of space-based observatories to study exoplanet atmospheres. In 2001 he used the Hubble Space Telescope to study the chemical make-up of the atmosphere around an exoplanet, and in 2005 he led the team that used the Spitzer Space Telescope in the first detection of light emitted by an exoplanet.
At Harvard Charbonneau currently leads the MEarth Project, hunting for habitable super-Earths orbiting nearby small stars, and is involved in the Kepler Project, surveying for Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars, the EPOXI Mission to characterize known exoplanets, and efforts to determine the chemistry, dynamics, and temperatures of exoplanet atmospheres.
Charbonneau earned a B.Sc. in mathematics, physics, and astronomy at the University of Toronto in 1996, followed by an A.M. and Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard in 1999 and 2001, respectively. He was a Robert A. Milliken Postdoctoral Scholar in Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology from 2001 to 2004, when he joined Harvard as assistant professor of astronomy.
Among other honors, Charbonneau won the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award in 2009 and was named Discover Magazine's Scientist of the Year in 2007. In 2006 he received a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, won the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, and was named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow.
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