Marc Kuchner

Marc Kuchner is an American astrophysicist, a staff member at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center known for work on images and imaging of disks and exoplanets. Together with Wesley Traub, he invented the bandlimited coronagraph, a design for the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder telescope, also to be used on the James Webb Space Telescope . He is also known for his novel supercomputer models of planetdisk interactions and for developing the ideas of ocean planets, carbon planets, and Helium planets. Kuchner appears as an expert commentator in the National Geographic television show Alien Earths and frequently answers the Ask Astro questions in Astronomy Magazine. He currently serves as the principal investigator of the popular citizen science website DiskDetective.org.

Kuchner was born in Montreal, Canada. He received his bachelors degree in physics from Harvard in 1994 and his Ph.D. in astronomy from California Institute of Technology in 2000. His doctoral thesis advisor was pluto killer Michael Brown. After he earned his Ph.D., Kuchner studied at the HarvardSmithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a Michelson Fellow, and then at Princeton University as a Hubble Fellow. Kuchner was awarded the 2009 SPIE early career achievement award for his work on coronagraphy.

Source: Wikipedia