Sarah Millholland

I am an Assistant Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. As a data-driven dynamicist, I am interested in a broad range of problems in exoplanetary science. In particular, I study the formation and evolution, orbital architectures, and interiors/atmospheres of exoplanets. I address these problems using a synergistic approach involving celestial mechanics theory, numerical simulations, and statistical methods. 

Before starting at MIT in July 2022, I was a NASA Sagan Fellow at Princeton University from July 2020-June 2022. I obtained my PhD in Astronomy from Yale University in May 2020, and I was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow from 2017-2020. My thesis was titled "Data-Driven Dynamics of Planetary Systems". I spent my first year of graduate school at the University of California Santa Cruz and subsequently transferred to Yale to keep working with my advisor, Professor Greg Laughlin. Before that, I was an undergraduate student and Goldwater Scholar at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I obtained bachelor's degrees in physics and applied mathematics in 2015.