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Eric Agol studies extrasolar planets, binary stars, and gravitational lensing, utilizing both analytic computations and numerical simulations to discover and characterize astronomical objects. His collaborations have included proposing radio observations to image the shadow of the event horizon of a black hole, as well as creating infrared longitudinal maps of extrasolar planets. Agol has written computer code used to characterize over 2000 transiting extrasolar planets and has proposed a novel technique for finding small mass planets similar to Earth. He began his career as a PhD student at UCSB, modeling accretion disks of supermassive black holes under the guidance of Omer Blaes. His postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins University with Julian Krolik focused on black hole accretion and led to the proposal of imaging the ‘shadow’ of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Center, Sgr A*, through high-frequency Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). Agol has been a faculty member at the University of Washington since 2003, continuing his research on accretion and expanding his studies into both observational and theoretical aspects of extrasolar planets. He has utilized data from numerous telescopes including the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and Kepler Spacecraft. In his personal life, he enjoys playing basketball, solving crossword puzzles, and cycling with his family in the Seattle area.
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