Julien de Wit

Julien de Wit joined the EAPS faculty in 2018. De Wit holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and mechanics (2008) and a master’s in aerospace engineering (2011) from the Université de Liège, as well as having completed master’s studies at the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace in astrophysics, planetology and space systems science. He then moved to EAPS at MIT to pursue his PhD and postdoctoral studies. In 2017, de Wit was part of an international team including astronomers from MIT and the University of Liège in Belgium that announced the record-breaking discovery of seven rocky, Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zone of TRAPPIST-1, an ultracool dwarf star just 39 light years from Earth, discovered with a network of small, 1-meter ground-based telescopes in the Andean high desert. Since then, de Wit has spearheaded the expansion of the SPECULOOS telescope network into the northern hemisphere with the installation of MIT’s Artemis at the Teide Observatory on Tenerife.