Caroline Piaulet

Caroline completed her undergraduate degree in Physics at the University of Montreal in December 2018. While she was there, she led during the summer several research projects, including one that involved studying the structure in massive Wolf-Rayet stars and another in particle physics, to implement new machine learning algorithms in order to optimize the yield of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. She worked with Björn Benneke during her most recent internship on the implementation of a new way of retrieving temperature-pressure profiles from emission spectra, having received a Trottier Excellence Grant.

In the winter of 2019, Caroline started a PhD with Björn Benneke. The focus of her PhD will be the atmospheric characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres using transmission and eclipse spectroscopy obtained from space-based observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the James Webb Space Telescope in the future. She is currently performing a joint analysis of radial-velocity data obtained with Keck/HIRES and Spitzer eclipse spectroscopy obtained within an extensive follow-up program of the keystone exoplanet WASP-107b, which presents an unprecedented opportunity for atmospheric characterization in the low-temperature (<800K) regime. She is also involved in the analysis of optical TESS phase curves, implementing a model to retrieve the thermal and reflective properties of exoplanet atmospheres from these rich datasets.