Tinney is an exoplanet hunter who builds the spectrographs he uses. He leads Veloce, the high-resolution, ultra-stable echelle spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope, whose entire purpose is to measure stellar radial velocities at the ~1 m/s level — a fractional wavelength shift of order 10^-9 — which requires obsessive control of thermal, mechanical and illumination systematics plus laser-comb or etalon wavelength calibration. He also works on brown dwarfs and on disentangling stellar activity from planetary signals. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — precision radial velocity is a frequency-metrology problem dressed as astronomy: like a pT/sqrt(Hz) magnetometer, the instrument's raw sensitivity was solved years ago and all remaining progress is in systematics and calibration. Good pivot target for a metrology-trained candidate.

Unruh studies stellar magnetic activity, starspots and irradiance variability and their effect on exoplanet transit and radial-velocity observations, helping to characterise host stars for precise exoplanet measurements.