Field
Location (during time of takeover)
School/Institution
| Undergrad | University of the Philippines Los Baños |
|---|---|
| Masters | University of Tokyo |
| PhD | University of Tokyo |
| Postdoc | University of Tokyo |
| Internship | Academia Sinica |
| Professor / Asst. Professor | Ateneo de Davao University |
Featured on January 3, 2022
It’s a new year, a new work week and of course, time for a new feature on Pinoy Scientists! Meet Jerome de Leon, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tokyo.
Jerome graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Physics from the University of the Philippines Los Baños and later briefly worked as a researcher in a private space company. He then took up his Master’s and Ph.D. in Astronomy at the University of Tokyo, with support from the Monbukagakusho Scholarship.
During his research internship at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Jerome was one of the founding members of Association of Filipino Students in Taiwan (AFST) and was also the president of Association of Filipino Students in Japan (AFSJ).
Jerome also founded the Filipino Astronomy Community and is also currently a mentor at SIDHI which provides mentorship to high school students.
His most recent teaching stint was at the Ateneo de Davao University where he taught Introduction to Astronomy and Data Analysis to Aerospace Engineering students.
Some fun facts about Jerome:
- His main love is physics and he only learned astronomy formally after the age of 18 when he started working for his undergraduate thesis under the supervision of Dr. Rogel Mari Sese, one of the very few Filipino astrophysicists in the country.
- Jerome built his first telescope from scratch and was able to automate capturing high-resolution images of the Sun as part of his undergraduate thesis. Since his graduate studies, he has been using several telescopes around the world, some of which are the biggest–like the Subaru telescope which has a monolithic mirror 8-meter across, located on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. He also traveled to some of the remotest observatories in the world located in Tenerife Island, Spain ????????and Sutherland, South Africa.
- As part of his Ph.D. thesis, he led a group of international astronomers to discover 37 new planets located outside the Solar System that have typical sizes between that of Earth’s and Neptune’s–anything unlike the planets in the Solar System!
