Rate My Professor Benjamin Montet

Montet's research specializes in detecting and characterizing planets around nearby stars, understanding the evolution of stellar magnetic activity such as starspots and flares, and applying machine learning techniques to datasets from NASA's Kepler and TESS missions as well as ground-based facilities. He leads an ARC Discovery Project on detecting circumbinary planets and has developed open-source tools including 'eleanor' for extracting TESS light curves and 'stella' for identifying flares via convolutional neural networks. His contributions include over 100 publications with an h-index of 41, among them first-author papers such as 'KIC 8462852 Faded Throughout the Kepler Mission' (ApJL, 2016), 'Long Term Photometric Variability in Kepler Full Frame Images: Magnetic Cycles of Sun-Like Stars' (ApJ, 2017), and 'The Young Planet DS Tuc Ab Has a Low Obliquity' (AJ, 2020), as well as co-authoring 'A close-in giant planet escapes engulfment by its star' (Nature, 2023). Montet has received the 2025 New South Wales Young Tall Poppy Science Award, UNSW School of Physics Education Impact & Innovation Award (2024), UNSW Scientia Fellowship (2019-present), NASA Sagan Fellowship (2016-2019), and NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2012). He supervises students at all levels on exoplanet and stellar astrophysics projects, advancing knowledge on planetary system architectures and habitability.