Eve J. Lee

My group studies a broad range of topics related to planet and star formation. Some of the driving questions include:

• What are the key physical processes that drive various patterns we see in exoplanet population?
• How do different stellar properties affect the emerging planetary systems?
• How do dust grains, the initial building material of planets, organize themselves in protoplanetary disks?

Recent highlights

• Dust-gas dynamics in rings:
  • Rapid destruction of rings at high Stokes number in GIZMO (Lee, Fuentes, & Hopkins 2022)
  • Probing Dust and Gas Properties Using Ringed Disks (Lee 2024)
• Physics of planetary accretion:
  • The Not-so Dramatic Effect of Advective Flows on Gas Accretion (Savignac & Lee 2024)
  • Impacting Atmospheres: How Late-Stage Pollution Alters Exoplanet Composition (Vlahos, Chachan, Savignac & Lee 2024)
  • Creating the radius gap without mass loss:
    • Paper 1 (Lee & Connors 2021)
    • Paper 2 (Lee, Karalis, & Thorngren 2022)
• Inner-Outer planet correlation:
  • Theory and stellar mass dependence (Chachan & Lee 2023)
  • Observed strong correlation for FGK dwarfs (Bryan & Lee 2024)
• Understanding exoplanet orbital period distribution:
  • For Sub-Neptunes and Ultra-Short Period Planets (Lee & Chiang 2017)
  • Dynamical erasure of migratory signatures and flattening of period distribution (Marimbu & Lee 2024)
  • For Jupiters under disk migration (Hallatt & Lee 2020)
  • For Sub-Saturns under evaporation (Hallatt & Lee 2022)

Postdocs

See below opportunities. Interested applicants are highly encouraged to reach out to me.

Graduate students

• Vincent Savignac (McGill --> PhD @ UC San Diego)
• Maya Tatarelli (McGill MSc, to be completed 12/24 --> PhD @ Côte d'Azur)

Undergraduate students

• Lina D'Aoust (Trottier Summer Intern '24 --> Honours thesis, U Victoria)
• Emilia Vlahos (McGill NSERC USRA '23; poster at Exo5)

Former members

Yayaati Chachan (CITA National Fellow '24 --> Postdoc w/ Jonathan Fortney @ UC Santa Cruz), Amy Steele (PDF '23 w/ Nicolas Cowan --> Director of Astronomy and Research, Yerkes Observatory), Tim Hallatt (McGill PhD '24 --> Postdoc w/ Sarah Millholland @ MIT), Rafael Fuentes (PhD of Andrew Cumming '22, MITACS intern --> Postdoc @ CU Boulder --> Fellow @ Caltech), Amalia Karalis (McGill MSc '24), Kevin Marimbu (McGill MSc '24), Noah Goldman (McGill MSc '23 --> Neuroimaging Engineer, Washington University in St. Louis), Cheryl Wang (McGill MSc '23 w/ Nicolas Cowan --> PhD Engineering, McGill), Luca Camarra (NSERC USRA '24, McGill), Antoine Bourdin (McGill UG '23), Philip Richard (McGill UG '23 --> PhD Physics, U Toronto), Abigail Denney (McGill UG '22 --> PhD Astronomy, U Toronto), Mattias Lazda (McGill UG '22 --> PhD Astronomy, U Toronto), Robin Leman (McGill UG '22 --> Associate Programmer, Relic Entertainment), Michael Poon (Toronto UG '21 --> PhD Astronomy, U Toronto), Dasen Ye (McGill UG '21 --> MSc Physics, McGill), Nicholas Connors (McGill UG '19 --> Software Engineer, Matrox Imaging --> MSc, U de Montreal), Jonathan Lin (UC Berkeley UG '18 w/ Eugene Chiang --> PhD Physics & Astro, UCLA, NSF GRFP)

• Postdocs: NSF fellowship, NASA Hubble fellowship
• Grad students: apply to UC San Diego Astronomy PhD Program
• Undergrads: see various research opportunities at UC San Diego here

My approach to teaching is to emphasize conceptual understanding and to train the ability to apply those concepts to solve interesting problems. My teaching strategy is featured on McGill's Teaching and Learning Service's website as an example to enhance students' learning and motivation: wiki and PDF.

Courses developed:

• (Grad) PHYS 601/602: Introduction to Graduate Studies in Physics 1/2
This is a professional development course series designed to address faculty-student gap in expectations, build a sense of community and cohort, and to equip students with skills in e.g., proposal writing, effective teaching, scientific communication, data management, and comprehensive oral exams.

Courses taught:

• (UG) PHYS 340/350: Majors/Honours Electricity and Magnetism
• (UG) PHYS 432: Physics of Fluids
• (Grad) PHYS 642: Radiative Processes in Astrophysics
• (Grad) PHYS 643: Astrophysical Fluids