Joseph Harrington

Biography

Joseph Harrington began observing and modeling giant planets as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his bachelor’s in physics and doctoral degree in planetary science. His pre-impact model of the collision of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994, part of his Ph.D. thesis, was published on the cover of Nature and garnered international popular attention.

Harrington then held a National Research Council Fellowship at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, during which he modeled the aftermath of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact and also identified the majority of planetary waves known on planets other than Earth. From 1997 to 2006, he worked as a staff scientist at Cornell University, where his interests shifted to observing extrasolar planets. He was part of the team that first measured light from an extrasolar planet, a result published in Nature in April 2005.

He joined UCF’s Planetary Sciences Group in the Department of Physics, part of the College of Sciences, in 2006, where he continued his exoplanet work by being the first to measure the difference between day and night on an exoplanet. His recent work includes the detection of carbon dioxide on a planet outside the solar system and finding water on an ultra-hot exoplanet, both using the James Webb Space Telescope. A leader in the open-source and open-science movements, he worked on a National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine study that defined the open-science policies now implemented in NASA’s grant programs.