Chris Ormel is an NWO VIDI research group leader at the University of Amsterdam. After concluding his PhD research at the University of Groningen in 2008, he obtained a Humboldt fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and then, in 2011, a NASA Hubble fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy in 2014, where he heads the “Origins of super-Earths” research group.
Chris' long-term research goal is to understand the formation and orbital configuration of planetary systems and their diversity. Currently, his research focuses towards understanding the origin of super-Earths planets – a class of planets of size between the Earth and Neptune, but orbiting their host stars at very short distances. Uniquely, Chris is an expert on almost every aspect of planet formation, including dust collision physics, particle aerodynamics and transport processes, turbulence, and gravitational dynamics. Click here to find out more about his research projects.
Planets, planet formation, planetary systems, circumstellar disks