Astrophysicist · Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge
I study how planets around other stars formed, and how they came to be where we find them today.
I work in Didier Queloz's group, using telescopes in space and on the ground.
A transit: the brief dimming of a star as its planet passes in front. Illustrative data.
Giant planets that orbit closer to their stars than Mercury does to the Sun probably formed further out and moved inwards. I measure how tilted their orbits are, from the shapes of their transits across fast-spinning stars, to test how that happened.
More on this: How hot Jupiters arrivedTOI-178 has six planets, five of them locked in a chain of orbital resonances. My JWST observations of three of them test what their atmospheres are made of, and so where in the young system they formed.
More on this: Small planets with JWSTRobotic telescopes searching for Earth-sized planets around the smallest, coolest stars. I develop the pipeline that turns each night's data into the measurements used to find them.
More on this: SPECULOOSESA's space telescope for measuring the sizes of known planets precisely. I'm on its science team, and I led its largest programme, refining the sizes of planets in multi-planet systems.
More on this: CHEOPSJWST NIRSpec finds no clear signs of an atmosphere on TOI‑1685 b
Fisher, Hooton, Gressier et al. · Monthly Notices of the RAS · 2026 · joint first author
Hooton, Hoyer, Kitzmann et al. · Astronomy & Astrophysics · 2022 · first author
Storms or systematics? The changing secondary eclipse depth of WASP‑12b
Hooton, de Mooij, Watson et al. · Monthly Notices of the RAS · 2019 · first author
A ground-based near-ultraviolet secondary eclipse observation of KELT‑9b
Hooton, Watson, de Mooij et al. · The Astrophysical Journal Letters · 2018 · first author