Team

iREx is proud to welcome Björn Benneke, new professor at Université de Montréal

Björn Benneke
Björn Benneke

Björn Benneke, a world-leading expert on exoplanet’s atmospheres, becomes Assistant Professor at the Department of physics of Université de Montréal. He is arriving at Université de Montréal from Caltech where he completed a 4-year postdoctoral fellowship focused on exoplanet observation and modeling. He previously received his PhD at MIT supervised by Sara Seager.

Professor Benneke has state-of-art atmospheric modeling tools and a wide range of exciting new data sets from the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and the 10-meter Keck telescopes. He is the principal investigator of the largest Hubble Space Telescope program to characterize super-Earths as well as a large Keck Telescope program to study giant exoplanets.
A team of 4 graduate students joins him to work on his research projects: Prashansa Gupta, who got her physics degree from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, will start a PhD, Jonathan Chan, who got his physics and space science degree from the Royal Military College of Canada in Ontario, a MSc, Stefan Pelletier, who got his physics degree from McGill, a MSc and Steven Rogowski, who got his astrophysics and physics degree from University of Calgary in Alberta, who was a summer intern in the summer of 2017 at Université de Montréal, and who is continuing with his MSc studies in September 2017.

All iREx researchers are happy to welcom Björn and his students!