Josh Winn is a physicist and astronomer at Princeton University. His research goals are to explore the properties of planets around other stars, understand how planets form and evolve, and make progress on the age-old question of whether there are other planets capable of supporting life. His group uses optical telescopes to study exoplanetary systems, especially those in which the star and planet eclipse one another. Recent work has focused on the orbital architecture of planetary systems.
He was a Participating Scientist in the NASA Kepler mission and is a Co-Investigator in the ongoing Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission. After spending a year as a Fulbright Scholar in the UK, at Cambridge University, he returned to M.I.T. as a Hertz Fellow. While in graduate school, he worked in medical physics, condensed-matter physics, and astrophysics, and wrote for the science section of The Economist.