Primary Advisor: Nicolas Cowan
Secondary Advisor: Ray Pierrehumbert
Taylor James Bell is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics at McGill University, under the supervision of Nicolas Cowan from McGill University and Pierre Bastien from Université de Montréal. His current research focuses on the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres: especially highly-irradiated exoplanets. Taylor makes use of data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope to study hot Jupiter atmospheres. Recently, he has also begun to dabble with modelling the atmospheres of highly-irradiated exoplanets. One of his other current projects uses the newly comissioned polarimeter at the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic (POMM) to study the polarization of light coming from previously discovered hot Jupiters.
Previously, Taylor received a B.Sc. Honours in Physics at the University of Saskatchewan in 2016, specializing in astronomy. In the summer of 2014, his first NSERC USRA project at McMaster University under the supervision of Doug Welch and Alison Sills aimed to create a modern, uniform catalogue of variable stars in Milky Way globular clusters. His second NSERC USRA at the University of Toronto was supervised by Howard Yee and Allison Noble. In this project, Taylor studied the effect of environmental density and galactic stellar mass on the star formation rate of z~1 galaxies. His undergraduate research project, supervised by Doug Welch, looked for evidence of binarity in Type II Cepheid variable stars in Milky Way globular clusters.
