Dimitri Mawet

Dimitri Mawet graduated in Engineering Physics from the University of Liège (Belgium) in 2002, received his Master's Degree in Sciences in 2004, and obtained a Ph.D. in Sciences in 2006, also from the University of Liège. Dr. Mawet was a Marie Curie fellow at the Paris-Meudon Observatory (France) in 2002, and at the Institut of Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay (France) in 2003. He received postdoctoral training as a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory – California Institute of Technology in 2007, and then became JPL Research Scientist in 2009. Dr. Mawet joined the European Southern Observatory (ESO) as an astronomer and instrument scientist at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory (Chile) in 2011. After completing the commissioning and science verification of the VLT exoplanet finder SPHERE in 2014, Dr. Mawet joined the California Institute of Technology as Associate Professor of Astronomy in 2015, and became Professor of Astronomy in 2019. He also holds a joint appointment at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as JPL Senior Research Scientist since 2015. Dr. Mawet invented the Vector Vortex Coronagraph, an instrument to image exoplanets, and (co-)authored more than 500 scientific publications. Dr. Mawet and his new Exoplanet Technology Lab and Group are pioneering a new technique called High Dispersion Coronagraphy to detect and spectroscopically characterize exoplanets using the Keck telescopes, paving the way to Exo-Earth remote sensing with the Thirty Meter Telescope and future NASA flagship space-based missions. Dr Mawet's research has been supported by grants from the Heising Simons Foundation, the Mt Cuba Foundation, the McCormick Foundation, the NSF and NASA.