Samson Johnson

Samson (he/him/his) I was born and raised in Montana, and made my way through my hometown college with scholarships and working off campus jobs. I began work on exoplanet detection there with the MINERVA Collaboration, an array of telescopes used to detect planets through the radial velocity method. I continued this work in a post-baccalaureate position at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, where I worked for a year to help commission the robotic MINERVA observatory. I then went on to Ohio, where I began my graduate school career studying the variability of supernovae progenitors. I did this for two years before beginning work on making predictions for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman). My graduate work was focused on the anticipated yields and survey design of the Roman Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey, which has a main goal of detecting a large number of exoplanets through gravitational microlensing events. At JPL, I plan to further the survey design and examine how the anticipated results from the Roman Galactic Bulge Survey will improve our understanding of exoplanet demographics