MIT Kavli Institute Directory

Joshua N. Winn

Class of 1942 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics Faculty

Searching for solar systems like our own. Josh Winn’s hunt for exoplanets may someday reveal habitable, Earth-like worlds. MIT News Office, March 20, 2013

Josh Winn is from Deerfield, Illinois. He graduated from MIT in 1994 with S.B. and S.M. degrees in physics. After spending a year as a Fulbright Scholar in the UK, at Cambridge University, he returned to MIT as a Hertz Fellow. While in graduate school, he worked in medical physics, condensed-matter physics, and astrophysics, and wrote for the science section of The Economist. He earned a Ph.D. in physics in 2001, and subsequently held NSF and NASA postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He joined the MIT faculty in January 2006.

Research interests:

Prof. Winn's research goals are to explore the properties of planets around other stars ("exoplanets"), to understand how planets form and evolve, and to make progress on the age-old question of whether there are other planets capable of supporting life. His group uses optical and infrared telescopes to study exoplanetary systems, especially those in which the star and planet eclipse one another. He is a Participating Scientist in the NASA Kepler mission, and Deputy Science Director of a proposed successor mission called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Over the years, his group has also pursued topics in stellar astronomy, planetary dynamics, radio interferometry, and gravitational lensing.

Representative publications:

"Spin-Orbit alignment for the circumbinary planet host Kepler-16A", Astrophysical Journal (Letters), J.N. Winn et al., in press [arxiv:1109.3198] "A transiting super-Earth around a naked-eye star," Astrophysical Journal (Letters), J.N. Winn et al., 737, 18 (2011), "Hot stars with hot Jupiters have high obliquities," Astrophysical Journal (Letters), J.N. Winn, D. Fabrycky, S. Albrecht, J.A. Johnson, 718, 145 (2010). "HAT-P-7: A retrograde or polar orbit, and a third body," Astrophysical Journal (Letters), J.N. Winn, J.A. Johnson, S. Albrecht, A.W. Howard, G.W. Marcy, I.J. Crossfield, M.J. Holman, 703, 99 (2009). "Misaligned spin and orbital axes cause the anomalous precession of DI Herculis," S. Albrecht, S. Reffert, I.A.G. Snellen, J.N. Winn, Nature, 461, 373 (2009). "The Transit Light Curve Project. XI. Submillimagnitude photometry of two transits of the bloated planet WASP-4b," J.N. Winn, M.J. Holman, J.A. Carter, G. Torres, D.J. Osip, T. Beatty, Astronomical Journal, 137, 3826 (2009).