Dr. Elisabeth Adams

Dr. Adams got her PhD from MIT in 2010, where she worked with Jim Elliot and Sara Seager on precisely-timed ground-based transit observations, in order to search for deviations caused by other planets and to improve other planetary parameters. Other major projects as a graduate student include: modeling the solid composition of super-Earths (planets with 1-10 times Earth's mass); predicting and observing occultations by Pluto, Charon, and other large Kuiper Belt objects; and analyzing the statistics of the 500 objects found by the Deep Ecliptic Survey to determine the debiased number of objects in the Kuiper Belt. As a postdoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics with Andrea Dupree, Dr. Adams worked with the Kepler Follow-up Observing Project (now the Kepler Community Follow-up Observing Project) to obtain and analyze adaptive optics (AO) images of over a hundred stars hosting planet candidates found by the Kepler space mission. These high-resolution images reveal nearby and/or faint stars which can contaminate observations, and are also used to statistically validate a candidate as a bona fide planet. Most recently, Dr. Adams is searching for ultra-short-period planets, with orbital periods of less than a day, using K2 and Kepler data.