David Charbonneau

David Charbonneau studies planets orbiting stars other than the Sun, with the goal of detecting and characterizing worlds where life as we know it could be comfortable. His dream is to detect evidence that life has influenced the atmosphere of an inhabited planet using remote sensing. His work towards this goal includes the discovery of the first transiting planet, the first measurements of exoplanet atmospheres, the determination of the frequency with which habitable planets occur in the neighborhood of the Sun, and the discovery of the first spectroscopically accessible rocky planet orbiting in its stellar habitable zone.