I research extrasolar planets – planets around other stars – and focus on developing and applying new data science approaches for detecting and characterising them. I have taken nearly every approach to exoplanet and stellar observation, including transits, radial velocities, direct imaging, and asteroseismology. I grew up in Sydney, New South Wales, and studied for my Honours and Masters at the University of Sydney. I studied abroad at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2017 I completed my DPhil in Astrophysics at Balliol College, Oxford. From 2017-20 was a NASA Sagan Fellow at the NYU Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics and Center for Data Science. I’m now a Lecturer in Astrophysics and DECRA Fellow at the University of Queensland.
As an ARC DECRA Fellow, I’m working on a survey of naked-eye stars in Kepler, K2, and TESS, to search for transiting planets. I’m also interested in exoplanet direct imaging, as a co-investigator on three accepted James Webb Space Telescope projects to study brown dwarfs, planets, and asteroids with new data analysis techniques. I’ve recently begun thinking about using radio astronomy to study planets’ magnetic interactions with their host stars, from both a theoretical perspective (modelling exoplanet transits with the Square Kilometre Array) and observationally (providing optical follow-up for colleagues at the European LOFAR telescope who have detected possibly the first radio exoplanets).
- Stellar Astrophysics
- Exoplanets
- Statistics
- Optics
Dr Pope’s publications can be viewed here