Biography
I grew up in Marin County, California and received my BA in Physics from San Francisco State University in 1999 after an interesting and circuitous undergraduate career.
I received my Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005 under the supervision of Scott Burles, and subsequently held postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. During my graduate and postdoctoral years, my collaborators and I used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) together with the Hubble Space Telescope to transform strong galaxy-galaxy gravitational lensing from a curiosity into a full-fledged branch of experimental astrophysics.
In 2009 I joined the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Utah, where I led a research group focused on observational cosmology, gravitational lensing, and galaxy evolution. During my time at Utah, I became more deeply involved in large-scale spectroscopic surveys of the Universe, with a focus on the algorithms and software that enable inference and discovery within the massive data sets generated by these surveys. I led the SDSS data-management team from 2012-2015 and consolidated SDSS data-production operations at Utah's Center for High-Performance Computing. I was also instrumental in establishing undergraduate and graduate programs in Astronomy within the Department.
In 2015 I moved to Tucson, AZ to lead the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC) at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). CSDC was created to maximize scientific opportunity in the big-data astronomy era for all scientists without regard to institutional affiliation. In 2019, NOAO merged with the Gemini Observatory and the operations of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory to form NSF National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab), an integrated national center for all NSF-funded night-time astronomy facilities. As CSDC Director within NOIRLab, I oversaw the development and operations of the Astro Data Lab, the Astro Data Archive, the ANTARES event broker, the NOIRLab telescope time allocation process, and the US National Gemini Office.
As of July 2024, I have moved to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (operated by Stanford University for the US Department of Energy Office of Science) to lead the US Data Facility effort for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. More updates forthcoming on this front...
Outside of work, I enjoy hiking, cooking, music, expanding my DIY home-improvement skill set, and hanging out with my super cool family.
