Benjamin Rackham
Research Scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBenjamin Rackham is a research scientist based in Cambridge, MA, who has spent the last decade discovering and characterizing transiting exoplanets and their host stars. With a PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Arizona and successive research and fellowship roles at UA and MIT, he blends observational expertise with rigorous stellar characterization. He has progressed from NSF Graduate Research Fellow to the 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellowship and now a research scientist at MIT, leading precision photometry and follow-up studies. Benjamin’s background in neuroscience and early work as an environmental technician give him a cross-disciplinary perspective on data and instrumentation challenges. He is focused on turning transit detections into robust planet properties and often pairs stellar physics with observational pipelines to reduce systematic uncertainties. Colleagues value his mix of careful analysis, observational savvy, and practical experience across academic research environments.
10 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
The University of ArizonaBachelor of Science (BS), Neuroscience, Bachelor of Science (BS), Neuroscience at Westminster College
Github Skills (30)
spectral9
k28
candidate8
astronomy7
astrophysics7
kepler7
python7
monte-carlo6
time-series6
prism6
transit5
sampling5
reduction5
plot4
targets4
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
brackham/speclib
Feb 2021 - May 2024
Tools for interfacing with stellar spectral libraries.
Contributions:16 PRs, 72 pushes, 16 branches in 3 years 3 months
stellarspectralpythonastronomy
project-access/plot-access-targets
May 2019 - Sep 2021
Make a cool plot showing the targets for Project ACCESS.
Contributions:1 PR, 7 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 4 months
targetsplotdata-visualizationvisualization
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