Vivien Parmentier joined LPL in December 2015 as a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor Adam Showman. Vivien is a theorist who works on cloud formation in hot Jupiter atmospheres, planets that are highly irradiated by their stars. He incorporates simple cloud schemes inside the global circulation model SPARC/MITgcm. By comparing the distribution of clouds from the models and observations from Kepler and HST, Vivien determines cloud properties such as chemical composition and particle sizes. His planned work at LPL is to use the knowledge gained on clouds to obtain better measurements of the water abundance in hot Jupiter atmospheres.

Vivien is from Paris, France. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure and obtained his M.S. from the Observatoire de Paris. He did his Ph.D. on analytical models of radiative transfer in planetary atmospheres at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, with an office overhanging the beautiful Mediterranean sea. One day, Vivien would like to resume biking around the world, but for now he enjoys his family life, which includes two daughters, Acté and Daphné, who are both under three years old.