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ExSoCal 2025 Agenda

Please use the Presentation Upload Form to upload your slides or e-poster by Friday, December 12th. PDFs are preferred.

Invited talks are 20 minutes (15 + 5) and contributed talks are 15 minutes (12 + 3). Invited talks are in italics.

The maximum poster size is 4 feet x 6 feet.


Monday, December 15

8:00 am doors open
9:00 am Opening Remarks Catherine Clark (Caltech/IPAC-NExScI) and Briley Lewis (UCSB)
Session I: Planet-Hosting Stars Session Chair: Jack Lubin (UCLA)
9:10 am Precision Transit Host Characterization with SPHEREx, Gaia, and JWST Zafar Rustamkulov (Caltech/IPAC)
9:30 am Planetary Habitability Under the Light of a Rapidly Changing Star Tara Fetherolf (UCR)
9:45 am The Magnetic Evolution of Stars <100 Myr and its Impact on Exoplanets Facundo Pérez Paolino (Caltech)
10:00 am A Hot Jupiter Orbiting a Metal-Poor ([Fe/H] = -0.7) Star Josh Simon (Carnegie)
10:15 am Scaling K2: Short-Period Sub-Neptune Occurrence Rates Peak Around Early-Type M Dwarfs Kevin Hardegree-Ullman (Caltech/IPAC-NExScI)
10:30 am Ages For Exoplanet Host Stars: Rotation & Lithium in the Kepler Field Luke Bouma (Carnegie)
10:45 am break
Session II: Atmospheres I Session Chair: Hanna Adamski (UCLA)
11:15 am Revealing the first thermal emission spectra of hot and dense sub-Neptunes Pierre-Alexis Roy (UCLA)
11:35 am Ultraviolet-Driven Atmospheric Degeneracies of an Archean-Analog TRAPPIST-1 e Evan Sneed (UCR)
11:50 am Chemistry and Climate Impact of Sulfuric Acid Hazes on Early Venus Danica Adams (UCLA)
12:05 pm Upscaling Venus: The Climate, Atmosphere and Observing Implications of a Super-Venus Exoplanet Emma Miles (UCR)
12:20 pm lunch
Session III: Instrumentation Session Chair: Briley Lewis (UCSB)
1:50 pm Henrietta: A new, near-infrared exoatmosphere spectrograph for the 1-m Swope Telescope Jason Williams (Carnegie)
2:10 pm Calibrating a high-resolution infrared spectrograph: the HISPEC Calibration System Ben Sappey (UCSD)
2:25 pm Spectral Order Sorting with the Multi-Object MKID Optical Spectrometer (MOMOS) Crystal Kim (UCSB)
2:40 pm Investigating the Differential Limb Coupling Effect for Diffraction-Limited Spectrographs Andrea Lin (Caltech)
2:55 pm Near-Infrared Polarimetry with Keck/NIRC2 Rebecca Zhang (UCSB)
3:10 pm break
3:40 pm Poster Pops
4:10 pm Poster Session I
5:00 pm adjourn
5:15 pm Pizza Social

Tuesday, December 15

Time (PT) Title Speaker
8:00 am doors open
Session IV: Planet Formation Session Chair: Jerry Xuan (Caltech)
9:00 am Setting the Planet Formation Stage: The Dynamics of Infall and Accretion Shocks in Protostar Disks Susan Terebey (Cal State LA)
9:20 am From Compact to Fuzzy: The New Interior Paradigm for Jupiter, Saturn, and Gas Giants Ankan Sur (UCLA)
9:35 pm The Occurrence of Giant Planets and Brown Dwarfs from 1-10 AU Judah Van Zandt (UCSB)
9:50 am What's the difference between brown dwarfs and super-Jupiters? Greg Gilbert (Caltech)
10:05 am Studying the three-dimensional architecture of transiting planets and their outer companions in the era of Gaia Jingwen Zhang (UCSB)
10:20 am Higher-order resonances from sharp-edge transitions Ian Brunton (Caltech)
10:35 am break
Session V: Atmospheres II Session Chair: Celeste Hagee (UCR)
11:05 am Unraveling the Mystery of the Western Hotspot Offset on the Young Hot Jupiter CoRoT-2b with Phase-Resolved High-Resolution Spectroscopy Aurora Kesseli (Caltech/IPAC-NExScI)
11:25 am How Optical Absorbers Shape the Circulation and Spectra of Hot Jupiters: Application to the JWST Spectra of WASP-121 b Pablo Drake Hernandez (Caltech)
11:40 am A Scatter of Light from a Polarized World Sloane Wiktorowicz (The Aerospace Corporation)
11:55 am Breaking the Accuracy-Speed Trade-off in Radiative Transfer Calculations with Transformer-Based Emulation Isaac Malsky (Caltech)
12:10 pm lunch
1:40 pm Breakout Sessions
2:30 pm Poster Session II
3:00 pm break
Session VI: Direct Imaging Session Chair: Jingwen Zhang (UCSB)
3:30 pm The power of high-resolution spectroscopy: from self-luminous gas giants to ExoEarths and biosignatures Jean-Baptiste Ruffio (UCSD)
3:50 pm Constraints on the Orbit of the Young Substellar Companion GQ Lup B from High-Resolution Spectroscopy and VLTI/GRAVITY Astrometry Vidya Venkatesan (UCI)
4:05 pm Directly imaging runaway accretion Nick Choksi (Caltech)
4:20 pm Metal enrichment in both volatile (C, O, N) and refractory (S) elements for giant planets in HR 8799 and AF Lep Jerry Xuan (UCLA)
4:35 pm An Exoplanet Candidate in the Habitable Zone of Alpha Centauri A Aniket Sanghi (Caltech)
4:50 pm Closing Remarks Catherine Clark (Caltech/IPAC-NExScI) and Briley Lewis (UCSB)
5:00 pm adjourn

Posters

  1. Hanna Adamski (UCLA) Decoding the Featureless JWST NIRISS/SOSS Spectrum of the Underdense super-Earth TOI-1685b
  2. Isabel Angelo (SETI Institute) Finding and Characterizing Anomalous Transit Signals in Kepler and TESS
  3. Bryce Bolin (Eureka Scientific) Exploration of interstellar objects with ground and space-based observations
  4. Beck Dacus (UCSD) The Science Potential of Characterizing Gas Giant Planets with HWO
  5. Alison Duck (Caltech) A Uniform Analysis of 8 Secondary Occultations with TESS of Ultra Hot Jupiters and a Brown Dwarf
  6. Celeste Hagee (UCR) Bayesian Analysis for Remote Biosignature Identification on exoEarths (BARBIE) IV: Analyzing CO2 Detections in the Near-IR to Determine the Long-Wavelength Cut-off for the Habitable Worlds Observatory Coronagraph
  7. Jennifer Park (UCR) Planetary Atmospheres Around Different Host Stars
  8. Te Han (UCI) Hundreds of TESS exoplanets might be larger than we thought
  9. Ken Herold (Cal State LA) Immersive Exoplanet Explorer (VR) concept
  10. Briley Lewis (UCSB) GPU-Enabled Debris Disk Modeling with GRaTeR-JAX
  11. Jack Lubin (UCLA) KPF-Community Cadence: Bringing a Queue Observing Mode to Keck Observatory
  12. Thomas McIntosh (UCSB) Updated Polarimetric Calibration for the Subaru/SCExAO/CHARIS High-Contrast Imager
  13. Jayke Nguyen (UCSD) Quantifying The Information Content In High Contrast Imaging Data
  14. Pranav Premnath (UCI) The GEMS Survey: A Status Update on Transiting Giant Exoplanets Orbiting M Dwarfs within 200 pc
  15. Claire Rogers (UCI) Eccentric Standards for Radial Velocity Jitter
  16. Edward Schwieterman (UCR) A Habitability and Biosignature Assessment for Lalande 21185, A Rare M Dwarf with a Directly Imageable Habitable Zone
  17. Grant Weldon (UCLA) Saving Doomed Planets: Mass Loss and Angular Momentum Return Boost Hot Jupiter Survival Rates
  18. Nikki Zivkov (UCSB) MEC Prime: Upgrading MKID Exoplanet Camera for High Contrast Exoplanet Imaging
  19. Eva Zlimen (UCLA) Interior-Atmosphere Connections: Revisiting Atmospheric Mass Loss due to Giant Impacts Among Sub-Neptunes

(last updated December 18th, 2025 11:05:14)

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