Franck Marchis
| Franck Marchis | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 6, 1973 |
| Residence | Mountain View, CA, United States |
| Education |
M.S. University of Toulouse (1996) Ph.D. University of Toulouse (2000) |
| Occupation |
Senior Planetary Astronomer SETI Institute University of California at Berkeley |
Franck Marchis (born April 6, 1973 in Caen, France), astronomer and planetary scientist, is best known for his discovery and characterization of multiple asteroids, his study of Io volcanism and imaging of exoplanets, planets around other stars.
The asteroid 6639 Marchis was named in his honor on April 4, 2007.
Marchis was born in France. He is currently a Principal Investigator at the SETI Institute. He received his Ph.D. in 2000 from university of Toulouse, France in planetary science. Although his thesis was performed while living in several places: Mexico, France, Great-Britain; the main part of his studies were made while working at La Silla observatory in Chile for the European Southern Observatory, an intergovernmental organization aiming to develop astronomy in the southern hemisphere. He participated in the development of observations with the first adaptive optics system available to a large community (called ADONIS on the 3.6m telescope). He moved to California shortly after receiving his Ph.D. in November 2000 through a postdoctoral position at UC Berkeley. Since then, he has dedicated most of his activity monitoring Io's volcanism with the Keck-10m telescope and the support of CfAO, an NSF science and technology center. In 2003, he was hired as an assistant researcher at UC Berkeley to conduct his research more independently and expanded it to a broader field, but still based on high angular resolution capabilities. In 2007, he was appointed as a Planetary Scientist at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute where he expanded his research on multiple asteroids using space-telescope facilities (HST, Spitzer telescope) and participating to development of space mission concepts to explore these new worlds. In June 2011, he took a full-time position at the Carl Sagan Center to lead the development of space mission concepts and new high-resolution & high contrast instruments for ground-based telescopes. He currently leads the Education and public outreach program of the Gemini Planet Imager, an instrument dedicated to the search of exoplanets, using direct imaging, spectroscopy and polarimetry which initiated its search campaign in March 2015. He has also taught on several occasions "The Planets" class at UC-Berkeley (Astro 12) and several classes in Spanish in Chile. He is an associate astronomer at Observatoire de Paris since June 2003, IMCCE. (ref [1]). He has appeared and has been a science advisor of several TV shows and documentaries linked to his work on the search for life in our universe and the study of Io's volcanism and asteroids.
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