Brendan Bowler

Tracing how planets form and evolve with direct imaging, spectroscopy, dynamics, and variability.

Research: Exoplanets are telling an exciting and rarely predictable story about when and where planets form, how their orbits and atmospheres change over time, and how our solar system fits into the broader context of planetary systems. My research group uses a combination of ground- and space-based facilities to address questions about planet formation, growth, migration, demographics, and atmospheric evolution spanning a single rotation to a Hubble time.  We use facilities such as Keck Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the James Webb Space Telescope with a focus on high-contrast imaging, atmospheric variability, population-level dynamics, young protoplanets and circumplanetary accretion disks, statistical trends in planetary properties, and habitability.  My ultimate objective is to directly characterize terrestrial worlds in the habitable zones of their host stars to search of metabolic byproducts of life—one of the most formidable but consequential goals of modern astronomy.

Biography: Brendan Bowler received his Ph.D. from the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii in 2013. He spent two years at the California Institute of Technology as a Joint Center for Planetary Astronomy Prize Postdoctoral Fellow before moving to The University of Texas at Austin as a McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in 2015 and a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow in 2016. From 2018-2024 he was faculty in the Department of Astronomy at UT Austin prior to joining the UC Santa Barbara Physics faculty in 2025. Past awards include the 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the 2020 McDonald Observatory and UT Austin Department of Astronomy Board of Visitors Teaching Excellence Award, and the 2013 Astronomical Society of the Pacific Robert J. Trumpler Award.