Caroline Piaulet
PhD student, Université de Montréal
Caroline obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Physics at the University of Montreal in Fall of 2018. She then started her PhD directly.
Her doctoral thesis, supervised by Björn Benneke, consists in using transit and eclipse spectroscopy data obtained by the Spitzer, Hubble and James Webb space telescopes in order to study the atmospheres of exoplanets having sizes intermediate between that of Earth and Neptune, some of which could be candidates for habitability. These planets are intriguing because they have no equivalent in the solar system, and much remains to be learned about their formation and evolution mechanisms, whose imprint is found in the composition of their atmosphere.
In the summer of 2019, she completed a 3-month research internship at the Center for Space and Habitability in Bern under the supervision of Center director astrophysisist Kevin Heng, during which she implemented a model that will enable to map the temperature and cloud cover of exoplanets based on phase curves obtained by the TESS space telescope.
During her undergraduate studies, Caroline obtained several internships, including one at iREx in the summer of 2018. Under the supervision of Björn Benneke, she developed a new method to constrain the atmospheric temperatures of exoplanets from emission spectra such as those that can be obtained with the James Webb Space Telescope. Other internships gave her the opportunity to study structures in the winds of massive stars and to implement an artificial neural network in order to process data gathered by the ATLAS experiment at CERN.
Supervisor
In the media
- Written interview after Caroline’s Summer 2018 internship
Contact
Office: Complexe des sciences, B-4440