Boccaletti develops and exploits high-contrast coronagraphic imaging instrumentation for direct detection and characterization of exoplanets and circumstellar debris disks, including the four-quadrant phase-mask coronagraph built at Observatoire de Paris-PSL now flying on JWST's MIRI instrument, which recently resolved the inner dust belt and all four planets of the HR 8799 system in the mid-infrared.

Bottom builds high-contrast coronagraphic instruments and adaptive-optics systems for direct imaging and characterization of exoplanets, including infrared detector and instrument-concept development for the Habitable Worlds Observatory. The group is actively recruiting postdocs interested in astronomical instrumentation.

Lagrange is a leading figure in direct-imaging exoplanet science, using the VLT/SPHERE extreme-adaptive-optics coronagraph (which she helped design and exploit) to detect and characterize young giant planets around nearby stars, most notably the beta Pictoris planetary system, and to study debris-disk and planet-formation signatures such as non-common-path aberration correction algorithms for next-generation direct-imaging instruments.

NON-PREFERRED (astronomy pivot, kept for review). Seager's group works on exoplanet atmosphere and interior characterization and the search for atmospheric biosignature gases, including leadership of space-mission concepts (Starshade, ASTERIA, TESS deputy science direction) that require high-contrast, high-resolution spectroscopic instrumentation; per public reporting she is departing MIT for the University of Toronto/CITA effective September 1, 2026, so any postdoc search should confirm her host institution directly.

Tuthill is the world's leading practitioner of aperture-masking interferometry and its modern photonic successors. His group's instruments — GLINT (a photonic nuller that destructively interferes starlight on a chip), Dragonfly, and the kernel-phase analysis framework — exist to recover structure at and below the formal diffraction limit of the telescope, in the photon-starved, speckle-dominated regime where naive imaging fails. Science targets are the dusty pinwheel nebulae of Wolf-Rayet binaries, protoplanetary discs and direct detection of exoplanets. 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 — this is the astronomy entry in the search that most closely mirrors the intellectual structure of quantum sensing: the instrument's performance is set by a fundamental noise floor (photon and speckle noise, analogous to the shot-noise floor at pT/sqrt(Hz)), and the entire game is designing an estimator and a hardware front end that saturate it. Preferred attribute strongly present.

Wang's BOBA group directly images young, self-luminous exoplanets by suppressing host-star glare with coronagraphy, extreme adaptive optics, and long-baseline optical interferometry (e.g. Keck/KPIC, VLTI), combined with physics-based computational signal-processing and machine-learning algorithms to extract faint planetary signals. He led early JWST direct-imaging detections of exoplanets and studies their orbits, formation, and atmospheres via high- and low-resolution spectroscopy. This is offered as an astronomy pivot on the filter: the enabling technology is increasingly complex opto-mechanical and computational instrumentation pushing spatial and spectral resolution, rather than a quantum sensor per se.