Lizhou Sha

I am an astronomer studying exoplanets and transient phenomena. I recently defended my PhD thesis in astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, working with Professor Andrew Vanderburg.

I graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018 with an SB in physics. My first job after graduation was with NASA’s TESS space telescope, whose mission is to search most of the sky for nearby transiting exoplanets. Under the guidance of Dr. Chelsea X. Huang, I helped build, maintain, and execute one of the mission’s two planet detection pipelines.

I was a Software Engineering Intern at Google’s Kirkland, Wash. office in summer 2017. I developed integration tests for the infrastructure of Google Compute Engine as part of the Cloud EngProd team.