Loïc Albert

Loïc Albert specialises in observation and instrumentation. He is currently the scientific instrument expert for NIRISS (imager and spectrograph), the Canadian instrument to be deployed on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2018. Loïc earned his PhD in 2006 from the Université de Montréal with a dissertation on brown dwarfs in the solar neighbourhood and the construction of an infrared imager/spectrograph.

After serving as resident astronomer for 5 years at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, where he conducted research on ultracool brown dwarfs and wandering planets, he returned to Montreal to help design the NIRISS, an instrument that will be able to observe the spectrum of Earth-type exoplanets.

His main research concerns the spectral characterization of exoplanets, using NIRISS deployed on the JWST. Presently, this consists in computer simulations taking into account all the instrumental noise contributions, and laboratory experiments to determine the bases of this instrumental noise. Once the JWST has been launched, this research will be done using real observations. He continues to study brown dwarfs, close neighbours of planets, by determining their temperature and luminosity through observations of their infrared light.