Pierre-Alexis Roy

In winter 2020, I completed my B.Sc. at McGill in the program Honours Mathematics and Physics. During the summer 2019, I did my first internship at iRex with professor Björn Benneke. My project was to modify and use our atmosphere modeling framework in order to self-consistently model the atmosphere of planet Earth and colder exoplanets. Then, during my last semester at McGill, I did another research project with professor Benneke focusing on chemistry modeling of atmospheres using chemical kinetics. This project also serves as a start to my masters program in Björn’s group.

I am now starting my masters degree with professor Benneke. My research again focuses on atmosphere modeling of exoplanets. We wish to create reliable atmosphere models which incorporate a dynamical study of the processes taking place in the atmospheres. Thus, I am essentially working on our atmosphere modeling program to incorporate new features to it and to test those against exoplanet observations. First, we wish to use chemical kinetics to solve for the chemistry in our models. Then, we would like to create 3D atmosphere models incorporating atmosphere fluid dynamics, allowing us to study exoplanets as real physical worlds.

Supervisor

Björn Benneke