Email: agol@uw.edu
VPL Focus: Task E (Lead)
Bio:
Eric Agol studies transits of extrasolar planets, for which he has created a widely used modeling code and helped originate the idea of detecting and characterizing planets using transit time variations.
He is a former member of the Kepler team, with which he led the discovery and characterization a closely orbiting super-Earth and mini-Neptune (Kepler 36), and he helped to characterize two circumbinary planet systems, including the first two-planet system orbiting a binary star (Kepler 38 and 47).
He first postulated the possibility of long-lived habitable planets around white dwarf stars (if they could form or migrate inward, and retain volatiles). He is also interested in atmospheric modeling of hot jupiters, coronagraphic imaging, radial velocity surveys, and mapping of extrasolar planets (using their time-dependent variation). He has recently helped to characterize the Earth-sized transiting exoplanets in the TRAPPIST-1 system