David Kipping is a British-American astronomer and associate professor at Columbia University, where he leads the Cool Worlds Lab. Born in the United Kingdom, Kipping is renowned for his research on exoplanets and exomoons, with a focus on long-period planets, rings, habitable surfaces, and astrobiological implications. He earned his B.A. and M.Sc. in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from University College London. Kipping's work involves applying data science, astrostatistics, and Bayesian inference to analyze time-series datasets of distant worlds.
Kipping is known for his pioneering work in detecting moons around planets outside our solar system and for developing the LUNA algorithm to detect exomoons. In 2018, he announced a compelling candidate for an exomoon orbiting the gas giant Kepler-1625b. He was also awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2018. Beyond his academic research, Kipping is a science communicator, hosting the Cool Worlds YouTube channel, where he shares his research and discusses astronomy with a wider audience. In a recent Cool Worlds Podcast, Kipping discussed the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on science. As of November 2025, Kipping and his team used the JWST to search for exomoons around the Jupiter-like exoplanet Kepler-167e.
