Unique and exotic planets give us an opportunity to understand how planetary systems form and evolve over their lifetime, by placing our planetary system in the context of the vastly different extrasolar systems. Hot Jupiters are the most readily detected exoplanets by present technology, as observational biases allow them to be the first planets to be observed via transit spectroscopy. With orbital separations that are less than one-tenth of the Mercury-Sun distance, these close-in planets provide us with valuable insights about their host stellar atmosphere and planetary atmospheres subjected to their large amounts of stellar insolation. Present observational technologies are not only capable of revealing some information about the atmospheric composition, but can also shed light on their size, thermal structure and dynamics. NASA's future missions (e.g. TESS, JWST, WFIRST-AFTA, LUVOIR) will give us the high-resolution spectra necessary to constrain such atmospheric properties with unprecedented accuracy. However, to be able to interpret the observed signals with any certainty, we need to build reliable atmospheric "retrieval" tools that model the expected observables adequately. For my PhD work at the University of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, I am exploring and developing these radiative transfer atmospheric modeling and retrieval tools. In my work thus far, I have developed and utilized the Oxford University Planetary Group's NEMESIS algorithm for high-temperature atmosphere retrieval work. I am currently working on augmenting the photochemical model of the NASA Astrobiology Institute's VPL software suite to address high-temperature giant atmospheres. The purpose of this upgrade is to extend the model's utility to such close-in planetary atmospheres.

In my talk today, I will be delivering an overview of the ongoing research at the Deming Group at UMD, where our primary focus continues to be data reduction of such present and upcoming NASA missions for measuring the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets. I will elaborate on some of the specific goals to be addressed by these individual future space missions, and then provide an overview of the modeling activities undertaken by my local VPL group at GSFC (with Shawn Domagal-Goldman and Ravi Kumar Kopparapu) to enable this science. Finally, I will talk about how my own work leverages these ongoing efforts, showing some preliminary results from my retrieval work with present and JWST-simulated data sets for selected H2-dominated hot Jupiter atmospheres.