Rate My Professor Benjamin Montet

Benjamin Montet is a Scientia Associate Professor in the School of Physics at the University of New South Wales, a position he has held since 2019, leading the NEarby Worlds and Their Stars (NEWTS) research group. He earned a PhD in Astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology in 2016 with a thesis titled 'Low-mass Stars and their Companions,' an MS in Astrophysics from Caltech in 2013, and BS degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, along with a minor in Mathematics. Prior to joining UNSW, Montet was a NASA Sagan Fellow at the University of Chicago from 2016 to 2019. During his graduate studies at Caltech, he served as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow from 2011 to 2016 and a Graduate Research Assistant from 2011 to 2013. He also held a Visiting Graduate Student position at Harvard University from 2014 to 2016. At UNSW, he advanced through roles including Scientia Lecturer from 2022 to 2025, Scientia Senior Lecturer from 2024 to present, and currently serves as Academic Director for RIL/WIL from 2026 to present.

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.