Planet Patrol

Veselin Kostov (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) is a research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and SETI Institute. His research focus is on detection, vetting and characterization of transiting exoplanets from Kepler, K2, and TESS, with the goal of understanding how these form, evolve, and compare to the Solar System.

Marc Kuchner (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) is an astrophysicist and NASA's Citizen Science Officer. Marc got his bachelor's degree from Harvard, his Ph.D. from Caltech, and completed one postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and one at Princeton. He has worked on astrophysical theory, observations and instrumentation, mostly related to extrasolar planets, circumstellar disks, or planet formation. Marc helped create two other popular Zooniverse citizen science projects: Disk Detective and Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. You can follow him on Twitter @marckuchner

Elisa Quintana (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) is an astrophysicist and the Deputy Project Scientist of NASA's TESS Mission. You can follow her on Twitter @elsisrad

Susan Mullally (nee Thompson) (Space Telescope Science Institute) is a senior archive scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute working on TESS, Kepler and JWST for the Mikulski Archive. Dr. Mullally is an expert in hunting down false positives in the Kepler, K2 and TESS exoplanet catalogs, and developing a machine learning technique to automatically vet transit-like signals.

Jeffrey Coughlin (SETI Institute) is is the Director of the K2 Science Office for NASA's K2 Mission. He leads the team responsible for ensuring that the highest quality data is obtained by the K2 Mission and delivered to K2's customers in the Astronomical community. His work focused on vetting potential planet candidates found by the mission by utilizing both humans and robotic algorithms. He also supported public access to the Kepler Mission data via on-line documentation and data management.

Robert Zellem (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) is an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on ground- and space-based observations of the atmospheres of exoplanets, planets outside of our Solar System. Specifically, Rob has been serving on WFIRST/CGI’s Project Science Team to design the science calibration plans for this direct-imaging instrument, commissioning NESSI, a new multi-object spectrograph at Palomar Observatory that will study tens of these alien worlds, has been involved in benchmarking the performance through simulations of NASA and ESA exoplanet-dedicated missions, and leading citizen science projects to help aid in the characterization of exoplanets.

Knicole Colón (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) is an astrophysicist and the Deputy Director of NASA's TESS Guest Investigator Program Office. She is also the Deputy Project Scientist for Exoplanet Science for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Her work focuses on the search for transiting exoplanets and characterization of their atmospheres using a variety of ground- and space-based telescopes. You can follow her on Twitter @super_knova.

Quadry Chance works in investigating exoplanet system architectures and the underlying formation pathways using a combination of simulations and observational data. To that end, he also works closely with part of the TESS collaboration through Goddard Space Flight Center to identify and confirm planet candidates.
Quadry was born in south Florida and raised mostly in Pensacola, FL. He attended undergrad at the University of Arizona and graduated from there with my B.S. in astronomy in 2018. He then attended the Fisk-Vanderbilt Bridge Program for a year before starting as a PhD student at University of Florida in fall 2019.

Yoni Brande is a post-baccalaureate research assistant in the Planetary Systems Lab at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, working on the discovery and characterization of transiting exoplanets with TESS and Hubble, exoplanet direct imaging with the upcoming JWST, and enabling collaborative exoplanet science through NASA Goddard’s Exoplanet Modeling and Analysis Center. Yoni graduated from the University of Maryland in 2017, and will be starting his PhD at the University of Kansas in Fall 2020. Twitter: @YoniAstro

John Ahlers (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) is an astrophysicist on a postdoctoral fellowship at NASA GSFC. John has worked mainly on observations of exoplanets, measuring their overall properties and investigating their formation histories and current-day atmospheric processes. His expertise specializes in hot planets around hot, massive stars. John has led investigations on numerous individual exoplanetary systems using the Kepler and TESS space telescopes, revealing some of the hottest and most exotic planets observed to date.

Luca Cacciapuoti (University of Naples Federico II) is a MSc physics student at the University of Naples Federico II where he received his Bachelor's degree (thesis on "Characterization of exoplanets via photometric transit with TESS"). His main research interest is exoplanetary science. Luca was summer 2020 NASA intern at Goddard Space Flight Center, where he became an expert on exoplanet vetting, i.e. the validation of signals in TESS data candidate to be planets, and is also working on the dynamics of multiplanet systems.

Marco Zaccaria Di Fraia is a PhD student in space robotics at Cranfield University. He received a BEng and an MEng in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Naples Federico II, and loves to spend his spare time...you guessed it, thinking about space (and writing poetry!). His obsession with space stems from wanting to find an answer to the millennia-old question "Are there kittens out there?". You can generally find him on Talk boards raving about interesting stars.

Rebecca Stockel is currently studying at the University of Denver, with a major in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics. She has done previous work creating a database with Cardiac MRI information and is looking to follow a career path in Data Engineering.

Aline Uemura Fornear is a Chemical Engineer by training, currently working in R&D in the consumer goods industry. When not working on Planet Patrol, Aline also volunteers with the Disk Detective project in the Zooniverse platform and as a school ambassador promoting science careers.

Sovan Acharya is from Delhi, India. He has a BS from North Bengal University, a diploma in civil engineering from Malda Polytechnic, and has completed many certificate courses from e.g. IIT's, IISc. Sovan worked as assistant construction manager in L&T Construction on many projects in India. He is currently a financial advisor in Kotak Mahendra life insurance company. His hobbies include astrophotography, participating in citizen science projects and encouraging others to participate. Sovan has participated in Bennu Mappers, in the discovery of asteroids (preliminary) by IASC, in identifying asteroids trail in Hubble Asteroid Hunters, in the discovery of supernova in Supernova Hunters project, as well as in exoplanet candidates from Planet Hunters TESS.

Lucas Terres de Lima is a PhD student in Geoscience at University of Aveiro, Portugal. He has a master's degree in Coastal Management, from the Federal University of Rio Grande, Brazil. Lucas has experience working with satellite images, image processing, drones, and Geographic Information Systems. His goal in Planet Patrol is to use his knowledge in mapping to help explore new planets.

Julien de Lambilly is a citizen astronomer from Switzerland and is highly motivated about all citizen science programs related to exoplanets. When not participating in the Planet patrol program, he tries to detect exoplanet transits from his backyard. Member of the Unistellar and SETI's citizen science network, he likes to draft TESS curated lists of exo-transits targets dedicated to the eVscope owners, so they can all join the fun! He's also involved in other citizen science programs, like Planetary defense and Asteroid occultation campaigns.

Hugo A. Durantini Luca(IATE-OAC, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba-CONICET) is an astronomy student in UNC-Famaf (Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física) from Córdoba, Argentina. Doing citizen science in Zooniverse since 2014 with Disk Detective, with experience in several projects inside and outside citizen science including being part of the TOROS project, which aims to perform an astronomical survey of the southern hemisphere sky in search of optical transients as counterparts for the gravitational wave observatory LIGO. You can follow him on twitter @HADL2015

Marc Andrés Carcasona is a MSc student in astrophysics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He holds a BSc in Aerospace Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and his current lines of research include the simulation of planetary atmospheres and, more recently, the use of neural network techniques to automatically vet gravitational waves.

John Yablonsky started his career as a recording studio musician. Later, he operated a music production company. In 2012, John became Director of a non-profit that distributed food and clothing to the poor. Subsequent to that, John returned to his lifelong interest in astronomy. He studied under Professor Alex Filippenko of the University of California, Berkeley. Before volunteering for Planet Patrol, John participated in Exoplanet Explorers and Planet Hunters TESS on Zooniverse.

Francesco Gallo is a MSc astrophysics student at the University Federico II in Naples. He received
his Bachelor's degree in physics in 2020 with a thesis on “Exoplanetary atmospheres analysis through the transit spectroscopy technique”. He's interested in the science of exoplanets, with particular interest on the atmospheres, analyzing HST transmission spectra data and on data analysis and vetting of lightcurves provided by TESS.

Michiharu Hyogo is currently working as a lecturer in Experimental Physics at Meisei University, Japan. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Hilo in 2005. He has received master’s degree in Astronomy at the Australian National university in 2010, and in Information Technology at the University of Canberra in 2012. He has been an active participant in Planet Patrol since January 2021. When not working on Planet Patrol, Michiharu also volunteers with the Disk Detective project in the Zooniverse platform, since launch in 2014. You can follow him on Twitter @HyogoMichiharu.

Riccardo Ienco is a Physics MSc student at the University of Naples Federico II where he is a team member of ExoplaNAts, the university exoplanets team. His main interest is the characterization of suitable life conditions on exoplanets and the host star influence on said conditions. He works as intern at ESO Vitacura Science Department (Chile) on the characterization of exoplanetary systems via Integral Full Field Spectroscopy using VLT/SINFONI instrument.