In this series of posts, we sit down with a few keynote speakers of the 247th AAS meeting to learn more about them and their research. You can see a full schedule of their talks here and read our other interviews here!
Background
In the last thirty years, it has become clear that understanding the relationship between exoplanet and host star is crucial for properly understanding the composition and habitability of distant worlds. One of the best people to talk to if you want to learn about these questions—and the cutting-edge techniques being developed to answer them—is Dr. Andrew Vanderburg. Ahead of his plenary talk, I chatted with Andrew to find out more about him, his research, and any advice he might have for younger astronomers in the crowd.
As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Andrew first became involved with research through summer research at Caltech. “I think I’ve always kind of had this fascination with [planets]”, he said “And Kepler had just launched and it was just completely revolutionizing what we knew about planets. So that really got me hooked on the field”. After completing his Ph.D at Harvard, Andrew then did postdocs across the United States, most notably as a NASA Sagan Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2020 he was hired as a professor of astronomy at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, though he moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology a year later. Finally, in 2025 he took up his current post as Assistant Professor at Harvard University.
Current Research
Andrew’s current work focuses on observational studies of exoplanets, though in he’s been branching out into some theory work as well for, in his words, “a fun change of pace”.
“My main goals are to just understand the properties of planets in the Solar Neighborhood, and to understand … what are the prospects for life outside of the solar system?” said Andrew. This involves things from understanding host star—or stellar remnant—composition to studying planetary atmospheres with the James Webb Space Telescope. It also involves old-school transit analyses, “to measure their masses with radial velocities, so we can learn about the bulk composition, like, are they rocky, are they gaseous, etc…?”, as well studies of how systems are aligned. “How are other systems different from our Solar System, where we see all of the planets orbiting in the same direction and plane?” Basically, if it has exoplanets, Andrew’s involved in it.
While 2025 was a tough year for astronomy, there were some upsides for exoplanet research according to Andrew. “Probably the most exciting thing that’s happening is our growing understanding of whether atmospheres can survive on rocky planets around M-dwarf stars. M-dwarfs are particularly important because they are the majority of stars and they have the majority of the terrestrial planets that might life like we know it. So they’re particularly important for answering whether there life in the universe or not. But we don’t know if those planets, even if they’re rocky, are particularly nice places to live because M dwarfs are particularly active and they can blast atmospheres away… so I think that the fact that we can actually start to get, you know, a handle on this question is really exciting for us and for the field.”
When I asked Andrew what he was thinking of talking about in his plenary, he said the following: “My plenary is mostly going to be about planets around white dwarfs. It’s a little bit of a more niche side of my work, but I think it tells a nice story. But I want to talk about a couple of ways that we’re searching for planets around white dwarfs and how those observations are maybe starting to tell us things about what happens to planets after their stars die and how that process sculpts the populations that we see”.
Advice for Early-Career Astronomers
To round out our interview, I asked Andrew whether he had any advice for undergraduates, or other early-career astronomers. “Really the big one is to make sure you love doing astronomy. Astronomers take pretty big pay cut compared to people in industry with similar degrees and skills, and we do that because we’re passionate about what we do. But that means you should really consider whether this is what you want to do.”
To learn more about ongoing and upcoming exoplanet science , be sure to attend Dr. Andrew Vanderburg’s Plenary Lecture: What Happens to Planets After Their Stars Die? at 11:40 am MST on Tuesday, January 6th at #AAS247!
Edited by: Lindsey Gordon
Featured Image Credit: AAS
