hosted by Professor Renaud Dehousse


Provost Ray Jayawardhana serves as the chief academic officer of Johns Hopkins University. He is also a Professor of Physics and Astronomy.

Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Jayawardhana served as the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University and the Hans A. Bethe Professor and professor of astronomy. Before his time at Cornell, Jayawardhana served as the Dean of Science at York University, following a decade on the faculty at the University of Toronto, where he held a Canada Research Chair. Prior to that, he held an assistant professorship at the University of Michigan and a Miller Research Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. Jayawardhana received his PhD in astronomy from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Science degree in astronomy and physics from Yale University.

Jayawardhana's research explores the diversity, origins, and evolution of planetary systems as well as the formation of stars and brown dwarfs. In particular, his group uses the largest telescopes on the ground and in space to do ‘remote sensing' of planets around other stars ("exoplanets"), with a view to investigating prospects for life in the universe. He is a core science team member for the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRISS instrument, and his group leads a Gemini Observatory large program on high-resolution spectroscopy of exoplanet atmospheres. He is the co-author of 150+ refereed papers in scientific journals, with over 9300 total citations (h-index: 54, according to NASA ADS), and the co-editor of two volumes of conference proceedings.