[2][3] When he was around 12 years old, he visited Pacific Rim National Park with his family, where he spent time playing in tide pools and observing the variety of organisms that lived in the intertidal zone.

At the suggestion of his friend Sara Seager, he applied to the graduate program in astronomy at Harvard University and was accepted.

[1] [4] As a graduate student in 1999, he used a 4-inch telescope to make the first detection of an exoplanet eclipsing (or transiting) its parent star, which yielded the first ever constraint on the composition of a planet outside the Solar system.

Charbonneau also pioneered the use of space-based observatories to undertake the first studies of the atmospheres of these distant worlds: In 2001 he used the Hubble Space Telescope to study directly the chemical make-up of the atmosphere enshrouding one of these exoplanets, and in 2005, he led the team that used the Spitzer Space Telescope to make the first direct detection of the light emitted by an exoplanet.

[citation needed] Charbonneau is married to Margaret Bourdeaux, a global health advocate and physician,[11] with whom he has four daughters.