
Spectroscopic Characterization of Exoplanetary Atmospheres
I reduce and analyze data from the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes to characterize planetary atmospheres. In particular, I studied the quintessential warm-Neptune HAT-P-11b in detail and found that its atmosphere is atypically poor in heavy elements (Chachan et al. 2019). I also used Hubble data to study the super-puff Kepler79d and argue that high altitude hazes can explain the spectra and mass loss histories of super-puffs (Chachan et al. 2020). To interpret atmospheric spectra, I co-developed the open source forward and retrieval modelling code PLATON with Michael Zhang (Github, Zhang et al. 2019, Zhang et al. 2020).