I'm an associate professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of PITT PACC (the Pittsburgh Particle physics, Astrophysics, and Cosmology Center).
I do research on cosmology - the study of the Universe as a whole, its history and contents - as well as the formation of galaxies and their development over time. I work primarily with large statistical, “survey” datasets, generally assembled by large teams of astrophysicists. My current areas of focus include:
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• CANDELS (the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey), the largest project undertaken on the Hubble Space Telescope to date (with roughly three months of observing time). CANDELS is providing our first comprehensive census of the demographics of galaxies as they were 10-13 billion years in the past, for comparison to those seen today.
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• eBOSS (the Extended Baryon Oscillation Sky Survey), a component of the upcoming Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV, which begins operations in Summer 2014. eBOSS will map out the large-scale structure of the Universe traced out by distant galaxies and quasars 5-11 billion years in the past, allowing us to explore the unknown nature of Dark Energy via the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) method (see this article I wrote for a “60 second” explanation of the technique written for non-experts).
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• The proposed DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) project, which will use a new instrument on the Mayall Telescope to map out roughly 25 million galaxies with the BAO technique (a ten-fold improvement over eBOSS).
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• I am particularly active in preparations for LSST (the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), which is now under construction (an artist’s conception is at right). LSST will survey the entire visible sky every few nights for 10 years, revealing what changes from night to night (e.g., asteroids that might hit the Earth, which move across the sky) while simultaneously providing rich information on billions of galaxies, allowing precision studies of dark energy. In the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration, I serve as co-convener of the Photometric Redshifts Working Group (see our recent white paper on calibration requirements!) and as Deputy Spokesperson (the Spokesperson is the elected leader of a high energy physics collaboration).