Pierre-Alexis Roy
PhD student, Université de Montréal
Pierre-Alexis obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Physics from McGill University in the Spring of 2020. He then started his Master’s degree at the University of Montreal with Professor Björn Benneke before fast tracking to the PhD program in the Summer of 2021.
In his research, Pierre-Alexis works on different modelling and analysis tools to help study the atmosphere of exoplanets, and especially to study sub-Neptunes. Sub-Neptunes are planets that are slightly smaller than Neptune in the solar system. This kind of planet is particularly intriguing since they seem to be the most common type of exoplanets found by astrophysical surveys, and yet there are no sub-Neptunes in the solar system. Hence, his works aims at refining atmosphere modelling tools in order to be able to gain more information on sub-Neptunes from space-based observations, and subsequently understand their formation and evolution.
Before starting his graduate studies, Pierre-Alexis started to work at iREx with Björn Benneke as a summer student in 2019. During this internship, he learned the basics of atmosphere modelling, and worked on producing atmosphere models of the Earth using exoplanet modelling tools.
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Office : Complexe des sciences