Lizhou Sha

I am a PhD candidate in astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Working with Professor Andrew Vanderburg, I study exoplanets, or planets outside of our Solar System. I use advanced computational techniques to uncover unusual planetary system architectures.

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.