Dr. Hugh Osborn – Postdoc at ETH and the University of Bern

I’m Hugh Osborn, a postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics. My research focuses on discovering & characterising exoplanets as they transit across their parent stars.

I am currently a PostDoc working at the university of Bern and ETH Zurich. My research interests include the detection small, long-period planets using space-based photometric surveys, the detection of transiting dust structures around young stars and the application of machine learning to exoplanet detection.

I was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Starting Grant in 2025 for my project the “Exo-Neptune Census” – a demographic effort to understand the compositions of Neptune-like exoplanets using masses, radii, atmospheres & architectures. This research project, alongwith my position of assistant professor, will start in February 2026. Read more (including about job opportunities) here.

I previously held the CHESS Fellowship at both the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics (MA, USA) and the University of Bern (Switzerland). This fellowship involved the overlap of both NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and ESA’s Characterising Exoplanet Satellite (Cheops).

As well as my involvement in TESS & CHEOPS missions, I am also the ESA Community Scientist on the PLATO Science Working Team, and an affiliate member of the Next Generation Transit Survey consortium.

After growing up in Norwich, UK, I studied for four years at University College London (UCL) before undertaking a PhD at the University of Warwick, which I completed in 2017. I then worked as a Postdoc at the Lab of Astrophysics of Marseille (LAM) before starting my current fellowship in late 2019.

I am also a keen science communicator, through my blog Lost In Transits where I write about all things exoplanetary from atmospheres to astrobiology and I run the monthly exoplanetary podcast exocast with Profs. Hannah Wakeford & Andrew Rushby.

To contact me, please use:
hugh.osborn​@unibe.ch
or
Dr. Hugh Osborn, Physikalisches Institut, University of Bern, Gesellsschaftstrasse 6, 3012 Bern, Switzerland

Academic CV (April 2021) available here and a full publication list is available on ADS, on Google Scholar or using my ORCID (0000-0002-4047-4724).