MIT Kavli Institute Directory

Amaury Triaud

Swiss NSF Postdoctoral Fellow Postdoctoral Scholar

I graduated from a 5 year Masters program at the University of St Andrews (Scotland, UK) in 2007 and then moved to the Observatory of Geneva (Switzerland) to prepare a thesis that was defended in August 2011. I stayed at Geneva for an additional year as a postdoc before moving to MIT in January 2013 to work with Joshua Winn and his team under a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship.

Research interests:

My research goals are to bring observational evidence able to help in the understanding of how planetary systems form and what their subsequent evolution is. I also have an interest in developing observational programs and analysing techniques to help find a characterisable earth-like planet and start the search for another Genesis.

To realize those aims, my research is focused on the discovery and the characterisation of extrasolar planets. I am notably in charge of the planetary confirmation efforts of the British-led Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) experiment for the Southern Hemisphere, and of some of our characterisation programs. This part of my work led to the discovery of more than 70 new planets transiting stars bright enough to allow for their atmospheric study.

Science Themes

Exoplanets
Binary stars

Techniques

Photometry and high resolution spectroscopy in the Optical and near IR

Instrumentation

Space-Based Observatories: Spitzer, Kepler
Ground-Based Observatories:
HARPS-North on the TNG (La Palma, Spain)
HARPS-South on the ESO 3.6m (La Silla, Chile)
EulerCam and CORALIE on the Swiss 1.2m (La Silla, Chile)
CRIRES at ESO's VLT (Paranal, Chile)

Representative publications:

PhD thesis: Constraints on planetary formation from the discovery & study of transiting Extrasolar Planets