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Andrew W. Howard measures the physical properties and population of exoplanets. In the 2013 study with Erik A. Petigura and Geoffrey W. Marcy, the team searched Kepler space telescope photometry and inserted synthetic exoplanet transits into real observations to measure transit survey completeness.^[ref]

Correcting missed detections changed the question from “how many candidates were found?” to the underlying exoplanet occurrence rate. For the study's 5–50-day orbital periods, the rising distribution flattened below about twice Earth's radius.

Erik A. Petigura studies exoplanet occurrence rates using transit observations. His 2013 study with Geoffrey W. Marcy and Andrew W. Howard independently searched Kepler space telescope photometry for small planets with orbital periods of $5$–$50$ days.

To estimate how many planets the search missed, the team injected synthetic exoplanet transit signals into the observations and ran the detection procedure again. Correcting for this recovery rate changed the inference from a count of detected candidates to an estimate of the underlying population. Their inferred size distribution flattened below roughly twice Earth's radius.^[ref]