The exoplanet field has been exploding over the past twenty years largely due to the advance of new detection technologies and instruments. My team has been focused on developing several new Doppler technologies and instruments over the past ten years. We developed the first multiple object Doppler technique and instrument to largely improve the survey speed and launch the largest radial velocity survey of nearby bright solar type stars, the MARVELS survey as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III program, for detecting a large sample of giant planets for statistical study of giant planet populations. My team developed new generation high precision and high resolution optical spectrographs and the new calibration source for searching for close-in super-Earths around solar type stars and also developed the first high resolution infrared Doppler spectrograph using a cutting-edge silicon immersion grating for searching for habitable planets around low mass M dwarfs. I will introduce our technology and instrument development and summarize early science results.

Dr. Jian Ge is a professor of astronomy at University of Florida. He was a University of Florida Research Foundation Professor in 2010-2013. He was an assistant professor at Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics of Penn State University in 2000-2004 before he joined UF as a tenured professor in 2004. He obtained his Ph.D in Astronomy at the University of Arizona in 1998 and his BS in theoretical physics at University of Science and Technology of China in 1989. He is the Principal Investigator of the MARVELS survey of the SDSS-III program in 2008-2014. He is the PI for the EXPERT, LiJET and EXPERT-III optical Doppler instruments and also FIRST near IR Doppler instrument. He led the development of the first silicon grisms, large format silicon immersion gratings and the Sine interferometric calibration source. He also led the development of the advanced image slicer integral field optics, and new generation coronagraphic image and pupil masks for TPF. His team discovered two new planets, sixteen brown dwarfs and hundreds of new binaries, and confirmed two transit planets. His team also discovered over 400 high redshift quasar 2175 Å dust absorbers, planetesimal infall around a young star, a protoplanetary disk, and molecular hydrogen in four high-redshift damped Lyman alpha quasar absorbers, and measured high redshift Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation temperatures.