Michael Bottom received his B.A. degree in math and physics from Columbia University in 2008 and his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology in 2016. He was an optical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab from 2016-2019 and is currently an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. His research interests are mainly in the field of exoplanet imaging and spectroscopy, including infrared detector development, wavefront sensing, and space instrumentation.