Professor Suzanne Aigrain

Suzanne Aigrain is a Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University and a Fellow of All Souls College. Prior to this she was a Lecturer at the University of Exeter, having been a PPARC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. Her research interests include the detection and characterisation of exoplanets via the transit and radial velocity (RV) methods, the impact of stellar activity on exoplanet studies, and the application of modern Bayesian data analysis methods to astronomical datasets. She has worked extensively on past, present and future space-based transit search missions CoRoT, Kepler, K2, TESS and PLATO (launch 2026) and is a core member of the Terra Hunting Experiment (THE), an ambitious 10-year search for nearby Exo-Earths using the HARPS3 RV spectrograph, which will begin operations at the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) in the Canary Islands in 2025. She pioneered, and continues to develop, the application of Gaussian Process regression to exoplanet datasets. She is PI of the project "GPRV: overcoming stellar activity in radial velocity planet searches", funded by the European Research Council, and receives funding from UKRI/STFC to work on TESS and PLATO. She also has a strong interest in science communication, citizen science, and promoting good practice in data analysis.