Dr. Kevin France grew up in West Virginia before moving to Boston for college. After another few years of academic nomadery, he settled at the University of Colorado in Boulder where he lives with his wife (a novelist and lawyer), son (an expert on identifying specific train lines of the Mountain West and avid builder of pillow forts), and aged Tibetan spaniel (a meditator). Currently, Kevin is an assistant professor of astrophysics and planetary science at CU and a founding member of the Colorado Ultraviolet Spectroscopy Program (CUSP). Outside of work, Kevin spends as much time as possible in the mountains and high plains of Colorado hiking, biking, skiing, and running (without achieving mastery of any of them). When he is at work, Kevin’s research focuses on exoplanets and their host stars, protoplanetary disks, and the development of instrumentation for ultraviolet astrophysics. He was a member of the Hubble Space Telescope-Cosmic Origins Spectrograph instrument and science teams, a member of the LUVOIR Science and Technology Definition Team, is a regular guest observer with Hubble, and is the principal investigator of NASA-supported sounding rocket and small satellite programs to study exoplanet atmospheres and flight-test critical path hardware for a future UV/optical

Projects

SPRITE, CUTE, ESCAPE, SISTINE, CHESS, DEUCE, INFUSE