Michelle Kunimoto

Michelle Kunimoto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at The University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on exoplanetary science, including exoplanet detection, characterization, demographics, and occurrence rates, as well as astrostatistics. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Physics & Astronomy from the University of British Columbia (2016) and a Doctoral degree in Astronomy from the same institution (2020). Prior to joining UBC, she served as a Torres Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2023–2024) and a TESS Postdoctoral Associate there (2020–2023).

Michelle Kunimoto is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, specializing in exoplanet discovery, characterization, and demographics. Her research focuses on identifying and analyzing exoplanets using data from missions such as Kepler and TESS. She has contributed significantly to understanding the occurrence rates of small planets, particularly rocky worlds in habitable zones, and has developed pipelines for processing large datasets to detect exoplanet transits. Her work includes studies on hot Jupiters, mini-Neptunes, and sub-Neptunes, as well as the use of machine learning for light-curve classification. Kunimoto's research provides critical insights into the diversity and distribution of exoplanets in our galaxy.