Postdoctoral Associates & Fellows
John Brewer
John is a postdoctoral fellow in the Exoplanet Lab at Yale who will spend part of his time at Columbia University,
closer to his home in NYC. John published catalog of spectroscopic parameters for about 2000 stars (Brewer et al. 2016)
with a technique he developed and calibrated against asteroseismic data to give a much-needed improvement in
spectroscopic surface gravity measurements (Brewer et al. 2015).
You can follow his research from his web page!
John was a founding member of
Planet Hunters, and
a guru for the group on everything from computer system administration to data reduction code.
John also developed "CHIRON TOOLS"
(Brewer et al. 2014), an integrated web-based software suite for target scheduling and observing.
If you are a CHIRON
user, you have John to thank for the beautiful
interface that has streamlined scheduling and observing (saving 1-2 hours per night of previously lost time).
John has unique expertise in database management. He is social force in the department and an
avid bicyclist. He also makes astonishingly good ice cream - supplying local restaurants and keeping his colleagues happy!
Songhu Wang
Songhu is a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at Yale, in the field of exoplanets.
His research interests seek to better understand the nature, origin, and evolution of exoplanets using both
theoretical and observational approaches. He is currently working with Prof. Greg Laughlin to study the role
of vortices in protoplanetary disk, and the dynamical evolution of exoplanetary systems.
He is a member of the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey, using 2.4m Automatic Planet Finder (APF) telescope
to search for Doppler velocity signatures of exoplanets around nearby stars.
He also uses APF to conduct follow-up observations of transiting exoplanetary candidates detected from K2 using his own pipeline.
He is leading the Transiting Exoplanet Monitoring Project (TEMP) he initiated during his Ph.D. to revisit the known transiting exoplanets.
He is also initiating an observational project to measure the spin-orbital obliquity of exoplanets and binary stars
via the Rossiter-Mclaughlin effect or via asteroseismology.
He earned his Ph.D. in astronomy from Nanjing University in June 2016 for his research on the time-domain
astronomy with Chinese Small Telescope ARray (CSTAR). Want to learn more about Songhu's research? Please visit his website, or contact him directly.
