Physical & Biological Sciences Division
Associate Professor
Faculty
Interdisciplinary Sciences Building
361
ISB 361
UCO / Lick Observatory
Before moving to Santa Cruz in 2016, I was an Assitant Professor at the University of Tokyo's Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU). I obtained my Ph.D. at Caltech in 2006 and then moved to a Reinhardt Fellowship at the U. of Toronto and a Hubble Fellowship at UC Berkeley.
I am the Principal Investigator for the Fiber Optic Broadband Optical Spectrograph (FOBOS), a new facility-class instrument concept for Keck Observatory. I am also the founder and Principal Investigator of the MaNGA Survey (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory), one of three core surveys of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-IV project.
I am an observational astronomer specializing in mapping the distribution, properties, and internal structure of galaxies across large cosmic volumes in order to address key questions about their formation and assembly history. My work combines statistical analyses of "Big Data" survey programs with targeted observations from premier facilities, especially Keck Observatory. I am particularly interested in the mechanisms that shut down star formation in galaxies and regulate their growth and assembly. As a leader of instrumentation projects for large telescopes, I am also working in the field of "Astrophotonics" to develop new tools that can dramatically enhance the capabilities of future instruments.
Galaxy evolution; Astronomical data analysis and methods; 2D spectroscopy
Tinsley Visiting Scholar, UT Austin, 2014
Robert J. Trumpler Award, "for a recent PhD in North America considered unusually important to astronomy", 2009
Dorothea Klumpkea Roberts Prize, Department of Astronomy, UC Berkeley, 2000