Dr. Matthew Hooton is a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Cavendish Laboratory Astrophysics group, working in exoplanet discovery and characterisation with Prof. Didier Queloz.
Matthew completed his Masters in Physics at the University of Warwick, before undertaking his PhD at Queen's University Belfast. During his PhD, he designed and led the QUB secondary eclipse campaign, which used multiple ground-based telescopes to measure the temperature and reflective properties of the planets as they pass behind their host stars.
After completing his PhD, Matthew moved to the University of Bern in Switzerland to work on the early data emanating from the CHEOPS space telescope. He managed the largest CHEOPS program, which used CHEOPS to follow-up small TESS candidate exoplanets to provide better constraints on their internal structure. He also developed a novel technique of using multi-colour photometry to accurately measure the spin-orbit alignment of planets that transit rapidly rotating stars.
Matthew joined the Cavendish Laboratory in 2022. He manages and develops the main pipeline that produces and analyses light curves from the Speculoos mission, which searches for planets transiting ultra-cool stars. He leads a program on the James Webb Space Telescope which has observed transits of three planets in a resonant chain which aims to understand whether they formed in situ or migrated to their current positions.
