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About

P. J. Wheatley is a leading figure in the discovery and characterization of exoplanets, with a career dedicated to designing and operating the robotic survey systems that have revolutionized the field. His primary research areas include the detection of transiting exoplanets, from hot Jupiters down to super-Earth and terrestrial-mass worlds, and the development of automated, wide-field photometric networks. Wheatley was a key architect of the SuperWASP project, one of the most successful ground-based transit surveys, which has been responsible for discovering hundreds of exoplanets. He also led the design of the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), a robotic facility at ESO’s Paranal Observatory specifically optimized to detect sub-Neptune and super-Earth sized planets around bright stars, bridging the gap between ground-based surveys and space missions like TESS. His visionary work on the ARTEMiS expert system pioneered the use of robotic networks for real-time follow-up of gravitational microlensing events, a technique uniquely capable of finding Earth-mass planets. With his most-cited paper on NGTS accumulating 46 citations, Wheatley’s contributions have fundamentally shaped the architecture of modern exoplanet surveys, enabling the statistical studies needed to understand planetary system demographics.