Dr. Joshua E. Schlieder

Joshua Schlieder is a Research Astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. His research focuses on low-mass stars near the Sun and the exoplanets they host. These stars, the red dwarfs, are small, cool, low-mass, and comprise 75% of all stars in the Milky Way.  Josh co-leads a large and successful collaboration to identify, validate, and characterize exoplanets on close orbits around low-mass stars from K2, the re-purposed Kepler telescope. This endeavor includes the work of citizen scientists through the Exoplanet Explorers project, hosted on the Zooniverse platform.

Josh is currently developing plans for low-mass star exoplanet research using NASA’s latest planet hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which launched from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in April 2018. The flood of data from the TESS mission will present new opportunities for citizen scientists to participate in the search for exoplanets. A comprehensive view of exoplanets orbiting red dwarfs will provide insight into how planets, including those that may be habitable, form and evolve around our closest and most numerous stellar neighbors.