Clémence Fontanive

Clémence Fontanive completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh, where she studied the demographics of giant exoplanets and brown dwarfs using direct imaging and astrometry. During her thesis, she placed new constraints on the multiplicity of free-floating brown dwarfs, and explored the population of giant planets in binary star systems, providing new clues on the origins of these objects. She then spent three years as a Research Fellow at the University of Bern, during which she discovered an exotic binary system composed of two young planetary-mass brown dwarfs, and used Gaia information to directly image four new brown dwarfs around stars. In parallel, she led two Hubble Space Telescope programs to investigate the properties of the coolest brown dwarfs around us.

At the Université de Montréal, Clémence continues to study substellar objects, with a focus on the Y-dwarf population: the faintest and coldest type of brown dwarfs. Combining HST observations and Gaia data, she measures precise distances for these objects and explores the details of their complex, planet-like atmospheres. She also contributes to a complementary JWST program on Y dwarfs led by UdeM, and expands her works on the formation of planets in stellar binaries and direct imaging surveys for giant exoplanets.