My research interests lie in the direct imaging and characterization of extra-solar planetary systems - exoplanets, circumstellar disks - with adaptive optics/wavefront control, coronagraphy, and spectroscopy. Benefiting from my hybrid profile of astronomer instrumentalist at the interface between science and technique, I develop, commission, and use advanced innovative technologies to perform remote sensing of other worlds with the largest ground and space-based telescopes in the world. My main angle of attack is high contrast imaging and spectroscopy, an emerging but exciting technique in the study of extra-solar planetary systems, which aims at finding new exoplanets, filling out parts of the parameter space inaccessible to indirect techniques, and, more importantly, characterizing them. Isolating the signal of planets from the glare of their host star enables us to, e.g., measure and constrain orbital motions with astrometry, analyze their atmospheres through spectro-photometry, and understand planet-disk interactions.