Marshall D. Perrin

Dr. Marshall Perrin’s research aims to understand our Earth’s context in the diversity of planetary systems through high-contrast imaging of nearby solar systems. Dr. Perrin and his collaborators use advanced imaging systems to directly see planets and dusty disks around other stars, and investigate long-standing questions about the formation and evolution of planetary systems. He helped develop the Gemini Planet Imager, as the lead architect of both the instrument's polarimetry mode and its overall data pipeline and data processing system, and conduct the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey key science program. He and his collaborators in STScI's Extrasolar Planetary Systems Imaging Group investigate nearby planetary and disk systems using the Hubble Space Telescope, and are now leading some of the first imaging studies of exoplanets with three instruments aboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): the NIRCam and MIRI coronagraphs, and the NIRSpec integral field spectrograph.

Dr. Perrin served a five-month stint as the chair of the institute’s science staff, where he worked to strengthen STScI’s research productivity by advocating for the needs of our research staff. He monitored the use of research-enabling resources, oversaw the peer mentoring program, sought ways to enhance the scientific environment, and consulted with the research staff to guide the institute toward exciting research initiatives.

An expert in optics and wavefront control technologies, Dr. Perrin served as the JWST deputy telescope scientist and the Wavefront Sensing and Control Operations lead, and coordinated the technical work of a diverse team of scientists and engineers who successfully unfolded, aligned, and optimized JWST's segmented primary mirror. The superb performance achieved with JWST’s telescope optics in flight was the result of wide-ranging preparatory efforts, which Dr. Perrin helped lead, including the demonstration of JWST's mirror control and sensing methods during flight hardware testing, development of flight commissioning plans and procedures, addressing complex systems engineering challenges, and team training and rehearsals to prepare for JWST’s flight operations. Dr. Perrin also initiated and led the development of the WebbPSF optical modeling toolkit for JWST.

Along with Dr. Rémi Soummer, Dr. Perrin co-founded STScI's Russell B. Makidon Optics Laboratory and helps lead ongoing projects there by engineers, students, and scientists, who work together to develop ultra-high contrast methods for direct imaging of small rocky extrasolar planets with future space observatories. The quest to discover and characterize nearby rocky planets—to understand how Earth-like or how dissimilar they are—is both a deeply compelling human goal and a dauntingly complex technical challenge that will drive these technical efforts for years to come as we prepare for NASA's future great observatories beyond JWST.

Before arriving at the institute, Dr. Perrin was an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, and part of the Infrared Laboratory team there. Prior to that, he was a NASA Michelson Fellow.

Education:

PhD in Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley
MA in Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley
AB in Physics and Astronomy and Astrophysics, Harvard University

Science Interests:

• Exoplanets
• Circumstellar disks
• Astronomical instrumentation
• Coronagraphy
• Polarimetry
• Integral Field Spectroscopy
• Wavefront Control
• Space mission technologies and systems integration
• Optical simulations and modeling

Research Topics: Star Formation, Histories, and Evolution; Exoplanets; Instrumentation; Circumstellar Disks

Professional Websites:

Professional Website

STScI Extrasolar Planetary Systems Imaging Group

STScI Makidon Optics Lab

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3191-8151