He chose to attend the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) for the beach and the chance to keep playing in his rock band, The Seventh Season.

[3][7] During his sophomore year as an undergraduate, he met Gregory P. Laughlin, and afterwards they began working together on the Solar System’s long-term dynamical evolution.

He has been involved in several projects as a faculty member at Caltech and as the Co-Founder and Head of Technology at Lucinetic, an artificial intelligence company.

In 2010, he and David J. Stevenson published a calculation,[8] which showed that hot Jupiters can become inflated as a consequence of Ohmic dissipation of electrical currents induced through an interaction between ionized atmospheric winds and the planetary magnetic field.

In 2012, Batygin demonstrated that misalignments between stellar spin-axes and planetary orbits can arise from gravitational perturbations exerted onto protoplanetary disks by primordial companions stars.