I am a Plaskett Fellow at the National Research Council of Canada, Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics (HAA) in Victoria, British Columbia.
I completed my PhD at the University of Victoria under the supervision of Christian Marois, and hold a Bachelor's in Physics and a Bachelor's in Computing from Queen's University.
My research focuses on detecting and characterizing exoplanets through multi-technique approaches. I develop orbit modelling methods that jointly analyze Gaia astrometry, radial velocities, direct imaging, and interferometry to reveal planetary systems that would be missed by any single technique alone.
On the instrumentation side, I played a major role in the SPIDERS project—a high-contrast imaging spectrograph that has now been successfully deployed at the Subaru Telescope. This instrument enables detailed spectroscopic characterization of directly imaged exoplanets and brown dwarfs.
I have strong interests in applied computational methods including astrostatistics, differentiable physics, and both high-performance and real-time computing. I advocate for the adoption of the Julia programming language in astronomy, and maintain several popular packages.
Contact
Email: William [dot] Thompson [at] nrc-cnrc [dot] gc [dot] ca
Office #332
NRC-Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics
5071 W Saanich Rd
Victoria, BC V9E 2E7
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