René Doyon

Professor René Doyon’s research activities are focussed on the development of state-of-the-art astronomical instrumentation for various ground- and space-based observatories. He is also actively involved in various observational programs for detecting and characterizing brown dwarfs, exoplanets and young low-mass stars. On the instrumentation front, he leads several infrared instrumentation projects (camera and spectrograph) for the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic. He is co-investigator of the Gemini Planet Imager, which has been operational since 2013.

He is also co-principal investigator of SPIRou, a high-resolution infrared spectrograph installed on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope since 2018. Scheduled for operation in 2015, SPIRou is designed to detect terrestrial (Earth-like) planets within the “habitable zone” of low-mass stars in the solar neighborhood. He is also principal investigator of NIRISS, one of the four scientific instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope.

Professor Doyon is the Director of the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets and the Observatoire du Mont-Mégantic

Graduate students

• Dominic Couture (PhD, co-advised with Jonathan Gagné, 10/2019-09/2024, planned)
• Charles Cadieux (PhD, 09/2020-)
• Alexandrine L’Heureux (PhD, 05/2023-)
• Olivia Lim (PhD, 05/2019-)
• Thomas Vandal (PhD, 05/2021)
• Laurie Dauplaise (MSc, 09/2023-)
• Salma Salhi (MSc, co-advised with Laurence Perrault-Levasseur, 09/2023-)
• Mathis Bouffard (MSc, 09/2024-)
• Avidaan Srivastava (PhD, 09/2024-)

Former Students

• William Frost (MSc, 06/2021-09/2023)
• Farbod Jahandar (PhD, 09/2018-12/2023)
• Jonathan St-Antoine (MSc, 09/2015-)
• André Beaudoin (MSc, 06/2021-07/2023)
• Ariane Deslières (MSc, 01/2021-04/2023)
• Antoine Darveau-Bernier (PhD, 2023, en co-supervision avec David Lafrenière)
• Dylan Keating (PhD, 2021, en co-supervision avec Nicolas Cowan)
• Melissa Marquette (MSc, 2020, en co-supervision avec Nicolas Cowan)
• Charles Cadieux (MSc, 2020)
• Dominic Couture (MSc, 2019)
• Simon-Gabriel Beauvais (MSc, 2019)
• Ryan Cloutier (PhD, 2019, en co-supervision avec Kristen Menou)
• Marie-Eve Desrochers (MSc, 2019)
• Olivier Roy-Loubier (MSc, 2018)
• Marie-Eve Naud (PhD, 2016, en co-supervision avec Étienne Artigau)
• Jonathan Gagné (PhD, 2015, en co-supervision avec David Lafrenière)
• Lison Malo (PhD, 2014)
• Patrick Ingraham (PhD, 2013)
• Jean-François Lavigne (PhD, 2009)
• David Lafrenière (PhD, 2007)
• Loïc Albert (PhD, 2006)
• Étienne Artigau (PhD, 2006)
• Christian Marois (PhD, 2004)