I'm Néstor Espinoza, an Assistant Astronomer and Mission Scientist for Exoplanet Science at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, USA. My research interests are exoplanets: from detection and characterization to how they form and what they are made of.
Half my time at STScI is spent discovering and characterizing transiting exoplanets. The bulk of my science is related to characterizing exoplanet atmospheres with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for which I'm the PI of two programs (PID 2113 and PID 2159), and co-investigator on several GO and GTO programs. I'm also a key member of the ACCESS survey (on which I based my PhD thesis). I do a lot of science with TESS, too, and I'm very excited about transiting exoplanets with Roman. I also have a deep interest on developing open-source modelling and analysis tools. I'm the lead developer of juliet, the transitspectroscopy package and abeec (an ABC sampler), among other software.
The other half of my time at STScI is spent on providing support for the HST and JWST missions. I work at the Instruments Division's (INS) Division Office as the Mission Scientist for Exoplanet Science, where I oversee support for exoplanet science accross all instruments. I'm also currently the scientific lead of the Exoplanet Characterization Toolkit (ExoCTK), which compiles tools to aid JWST and HST proposers interested in doing exoplanetary science and the current lead of STScI's JWST Time-Series Observations Working Group.
E-mail: nespinoza at stsci.edu | Phone: +1 (410) 338 4311