Dr. Ertel is the lead scientist of the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI), a sensitive, high-angular resolution instrument that makes the Large Binocular Telescope the first thirty-meter-class telescope.  With this project, he is working on instrumentation projects related to adaptive optics and precision optical interferometry.  Scientifically, Steve is working on enabling the future direct detection and characterization of habitable exoplanets through the present-day study of the habitable zones they reside in.  More broadly, Steve is working on projects related to exoplanets and planetary systems, circumstellar disks, stellar evolution, and generally everything that can be observed with the LBTI.  Most recently, Steve’s team has shown that exozodiacal dust is not a show-stopper for imaging potentially habitable exoplanets around nearby stars.  This result was prominently featured in NASA’s 2020 Decadal Survey and was vital for NASA’s decision to move forward with developing a future exo-Earth imaging flagship-mission.  In the next few years, Steve hopes among other projects to use the LBTI to image the first few such planets from the ground and to use exozodiacal dust as a scientific tool to determine in which planetary systems truly Earth-like planets could exist.