Overview
Mr. Trevor Foote is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate working with Prof. Nikole Lewis. His research interests include characterization of exoplanet atmospheres, especially toward the goal of identifying potentially habitable planets and detecting bio-signatures. With his background in engineering, he is also interested in detector development for use in the analysis of these far-off worlds.
His academic path has been a non-traditional route receiving two bachelor's degrees from Washington State University, one in Civil Engineering in 2011 and another in Astrophysics in 2019. During the time in between these two degrees, he served in the U.S. Army as an Engineering Officer followed by work in the construction industry as a Project Engineer.
Since 2021, Mr. Foote as been primarily working on the Pandora SmallSat Mission. He started as a graduate student job shadow to the lead instrument scientist Dr. Tom Barclay and has since become a contributor to the mission. His work on the mission has spanned a wide variety of projects from developing a 2D image simulator for the near-IR detector to creating an observation scheduler. His current project is to conduct characterization testing on the near-IR detector that will be on Pandora and from those tests create the reference data products that will be used within the data processing pipeline. Outside of his work on the Pandora mission, Mr. Foote as been involved in reducing observations from both Hubble and JWST, including a full atmospheric analysis on the hot Jupiter, WASP-79b, using secondary eclipse observations from Hubble.
Outside of research, Mr. Foote enjoys working out, fixing things around his home, and woodworking in his garage.
Research Focus
Advisor: Professor Nikole Lewis