Gavin Wang
Incoming Astronomy PhD Student at Caltech

Hello! I’m Gavin Wang, and I recently completed my undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University. I’m interested in the precise characterization of exoplanets and use a variety of methods to study them. My current projects include high-resolution spectroscopy of exoplanets with Jessica Spake and brown dwarfs with Jerry Xuan, orbit fitting of potentially the coldest directly imaged exoplanet with William Balmer, and testing planet formation models by measuring the properties of two planets in the youngest multi-transiting system. I am also developing likelihood-based techniques with Néstor Espinoza to reduce 1/f noise in JWST’s near-IR detectors, and applying our technique to the NIRSpec phase curve of the lava world K2-141 b.

In the past, I searched for transit variability signatures using TESS under Dr. Espinoza’s mentorship, and completed a precise mass measurement of HAT-P-67 b, the largest known exoplanet, with William Balmer. I was also an active member of the TESS Followup Observing Program in high school, where I helped discover and characterize a dozen exoplanets for the TESS mission.