Dan grew up in suburban Chicago. 

He thrived on Science Olympiad at South Middle School and Prospect High School, which got him started in the sciences.

While a physics major at Caltech, he did research in gravitational waves, neutrino oscillations, and synthetic aperture radar.

Astrophysics graduate school at Princeton University was the next step, where he worked with (among others) the late Bohdan Paczynski and was a thesis student of Scott Tremaine.  He further developed his interest in exoplanets as a Michelson Fellow at Harvard, and is now a Hubble Fellow at UC Santa Cruz.  The picture above is Dan in his office; no, not in a treehouse.  Here’s a CV.

In the fall of 2012, Dan will be starting as an assistant professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the University of Chicago. Interested in joining our new exoplanet group there, either as a grad student or a postdoc?