Insights into the diversity of exoplanet atmospheres in the era of JWST.

From religion to science, the quest to understand our place in the universe is one of the fundamental drivers of human progress. Since the discovery of the first exoplanet around a main sequence star in the mid-1990s, our current count of exoplanetary systems has exploded to several thousands. We have even performed in-depth studies of the atmospheres of many distant worlds, yielding insights into the previously unfathomable diversity of planets that exist in the galaxy. In this review article, I summarize work in which I developed several state-of-the-art analysis tools, and applied them to some of the first ever observations of transiting exoplanet atmospheres with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). These works provide clear a demonstration of JWST's revolutionary capabilities: enabling unprecedented insights into the chemical inventory of the atmosphere of a hot-Saturn and hot-Neptune, as well as strict limits on potential atmosphere scenarios of a rocky Venus analogue. These works also encourage new standards for exoplanet data analysis and have laid the groundwork for population-level analyses of atmosphere demographics.