Jessica Lu

jlu.astro@berkeley.edu

AstroTech Co-Principal Investigator & Lead Instructor

Jessica Lu is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Astronomy Department at University of California Berkeley. Her specialty areas include Adaptive optics (AO), Astrometry, Black holes, Stars, Galactic Centers, Optical/infrared instrumentation. Prof. Lu works on several instrumentation teams that aim to improve AO and astrometry from the ground and space, including the W.M. Keck AO system and instruments, the Thirty Meter Telescope IRIS instrument, the ‘imaka project, and the Roman Space Telescope. She is the Project Scientist for the Keck All-Sky Precision Adaptive Optics (KAPA) instrument.

Candice Brown Pacheco, Ph.D.

candiceb@ucsc.edu

AstroTech Co-Director and Instructor, ISEE Assistant Director

Candice is the Assistant Director of ISEE. Candice began her work with ISEE as a consultant for the Center for Adaptive Optics(CfAO) education division. She was an early developer (2002) of the ISEE Professional Development Program (PDP) and continues to work with ISEE to sustain programs like the PDP. Candice works on the development and implementation of other ISEE programs like AstroTech and, more recently, an ISEE Leadership Institute. Candice has expanded the AstroTech program to include events at SPIE and partner events at the Instrumentation Summer School.

Anne Metevier

metevier@ucsc.edu

AstroTech Instructor

Anne Metevier is the Director of Lick Observatory College Partnerships at University of California Observatories. She leads a consortium of San Francisco Bay Area community colleges and California State University campuses that work with Lick Observatory for college-level astronomy education and training projects. Anne has a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz, and her research has focused on galaxy evolution and involved multi-slit spectroscopy of distant galaxies with the Keck telescopes. Her role with AstroTech is to support professional development of both instructors and participants in the program.

Alicia Lanz

dralicialanz@gmail.com

AstroTech Instructor & Program Manager

Dr. Alicia Lanz is a physicist and systems engineer. Recently, Alicia built astronomical instrumentation for studying the evolution of galaxies and the process of reionization of the universe. Alicia received in her PhD in Physics from Caltech in 2018, where she built an infrared telescope aboard a sounding rocket (called “CIBER-2”) to improve our understanding of the process of reionization, when the first stars ionized the gas that filled the universe and allowed light to travel freely. At Carnegie Observatories, Alicia designed a fast near-infrared camera for Magellan Infrared Multi-object Spectrograph (MIRMOS) and completed the objective optics for the fifth Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V) Local Volume Mapper (LVM) instrument, which performs the SDSS-V integral-field spectroscopic survey of the Milky Way and Local Group of galaxies. Prior to graduate school, Alicia worked as a systems engineer in industry for five years and spent one year as a technical advisor in the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy, where she became interested in the physics of climate change. 

Sarah Logsdon

sarah.logsdon@noirlab.edu

AstroTech Instructor

Sarah Logsdon is an Associate Scientist at NSF’s NOIRLab in Tucson, Arizona. She is also the Instrument Scientist for NEID, an extreme precision radial velocity spectrograph designed to detect and characterize exoplanets and exoplanet candidates. Prior to moving to Tucson, Sarah spent two years at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where she developed technologies, error budgets, and test plans for the NEID Port Adapter subsystem. The Port Adapter is responsible for sending star light from the telescope to the spectrograph. Sarah earned her PhD in Astronomy at UCLA where she served as the UCLA Instrument Scientist for FLITECAM, a near-infrared imager and grism spectrograph for SOFIA.

Alan Garner

agarner@mit.edu

AstroTech Instructor

Alan Garner is a Research Scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. His current research focuses on using multilayer mirrors and critical-angle transmission gratings in support of the REDSoX sounding rocket. He earned his PhD in 2018 at the University of Florida where he helped design, fabricate, test, and operate two near-IR instruments for the Gran Telescopio Canarias.

Abhimat Gautam

abhimat@astro.ucla.edu

AstroTech Instructor

Abhimat Gautam is a postdoctoral fellow at UC Los Angeles. Abhimat’s research primarily focuses on the stellar population, compact objects, and the dynamical environment of the Milky Way Galactic center and its nuclear star cluster. In astronomical instrumentation, Abhimat primarily works on software for near-infrared imaging and spectroscopic data taken with adaptive optics on Keck and imaging with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Rose Gibson

rgibson@astro.ucla.edu

AstroTech Instructor (PDP team)

Dr. Rose K. Gibson is a postdoc with the UCLA Infrared Lab working on the development of HISPEC: the High resolution Infrared SPectrograph for Exoplanet Characterization. She specializes in building complex astronomical instruments and is particularly interested in ground-based instruments used for exoplanet science.

Jérôme Maire

jmaire@ucsd.edu

AstroTech Instructor

Dr. Jérôme Maire is a project scientist at UC San Diego specializing in the development of astronomical instrumentation for ground-based telescopes. His expertise includes exoplanet detection using high-contrast imaging techniques, the study of the propagation of light through Earth’s atmosphere for the design of adaptive optics systems, and the detection of astrophysical transients (such as gamma-rays), using high-time-resolution instruments.

Raquel Martinez

raquel.a.martinez14@gmail.com

AstroTech Instructor

Dr. Raquel Martinez is an NSF-MPS Ascend Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine with research interests in the discovery, characterization, and formation history of exoplanets. She is also a member of the science team for SCALES (Slicer Combined with an Array of Lenslets for Exoplanet Spectroscopy). Her broader educational interests include making classrooms, research projects, and academic environments equitable and inclusive for students. Dr. Martinez obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of Astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin in 2021 and will join the University of San Diego Department of Physics and Biophysics as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2024.

Mike Nassir

nassir@hawaii.edu

AstroTech Instructor

Michael A. Nassir is an Instructor in the Dept. of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he teaches undergraduate lecture and laboratory courses for both majors and non-majors.  He is also a faculty advisor for Physics & Astro majors, serves on departmental and college-level curriculum committees, and works with various secondary-school and public outreach programs.  Mike has also been a staff-instructor with ISEE’s PDP and Akamai Internship Programs since 2009, coaching participants in STEM pedagogy and oral & written communication.  Mike received his B.S. in Physics from Caltech and his M.S. in Astronomy from Univ. of Hawaii, where his research has focused on infrared observations of star-forming regions and spectroscopy of the solar corona. 

Jean-Baptiste Ruffio

jruffio@caltech.edu

AstroTech Instructor

Jean-Baptiste Ruffio is a research scientist at UC San Diego. His research interests include the direct detection of exoplanets and the study of their atmospheres to better understand the formation of planetary systems. Jean-Baptiste’s original background is aerospace engineering from France. He graduated from Stanford University with a Ph.D. in Physics and he was then awarded a David & Ellen Lee Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to develop high-resolution spectroscopy techniques for exoplanets. His expertise includes data analysis, statistics, and instrumentation data software.

Nathan Sandford

nathan.sandford@utoronto.ca

AstroTech Instructor (PDP team)

Nathan Sandford is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the chemical and dynamical evolution of ancient low-mass galaxies around the Milky Way and Andromeda, which involves combining observations from large ground- and space-based telescopes with models of stellar and galactic evolution

Sam Walker

swalker@cornell.edu

AstroTech Instructor (PDP team)

Samantha/Sam Walker is a Cornell University Research Excellence Scholars (CURES) postdoc in the Department of Physics and the Cornell Center for Materials Research. Her research involves the development and characterization of low temperature detectors to study the early Universe at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths.

Shelley Wright

saw@physics.ucsd.edu

AstroTech Instructor

Shelley Wright is a Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics at University of California San Diego. Shelley’s research focuses on developing innovative astronomical instrumentation and observations using some of the world’s largest optical telescopes. Shelley specializes in building near-infrared cameras and spectrographs, and studying distant galaxies, supermassive black holes, and technosignatures. Shelley is Principal Investigator (PI) for Liger a next-generation W. M. Keck Observatory instrument, Project Scientist for the first-light instrument IRIS for the future Thirty Meter Telescope, and PI of optical SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) instrumentation programs like NIROSETI and PANOSETI. 

Brandye Johnson

astrotech-admin@ucsc.edu

AstroTech Program and Events Coordinator

Brandye Johnson is one of AstroTech’s Program and Events Coordinators. She is also the Department Coordinator for the Astronomy department at the University of California Berkeley.

Nicole Mattacola

astrotech-admin@ucsc.edu

ISEE Program & Events Coordinator

Nicole coordinates all events big and small that support the programmatic goals of ISEE, which includes AstroTech. She arranges all travel, meals, and facilities for AstroTech, and can answer questions at any point from application to arrival in Berkeley about logistics. Nicole is a good first point of contact for AstroTech, and will connect participants with the right person to address their needs.

Previous AstroTech Instructors

Lisa Hunter

lhunter@ucsc.edu

AstroTech Co-Principal Investigator and Instructor

Lisa Hunter is the Director of the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators (ISEE) at University of California Santa Cruz. She has been collaborating with the telescopes and the astronomy community for 20 years to offer programs aimed at the undergraduate to professional levels. Her work has focused on equity and inclusion, development of professional skills, and effective teaching and mentoring.

Renate Kupke

rkupke@ucolick.org

AstroTech Instructor

Renate Kupke is an instrument scientist with the University of California Observatories, UC Santa Cruz. Her research involves development of advanced instrumentation techniques for use in astronomical instruments, including adaptive optics with the Laboratory for Adaptive Optics at UCSC. She has also been involved in the optical design and commissioning of scientific instruments for the Lick 3-meter telescope, the Keck telescopes and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).

Matthew Freeman

matthew.s.r.freeman@berkeley.edu

AstroTech Instructor

Matthew is a UCB Postdoc working on the KAPA project: an upgrade to the Adaptive Optics system on the Keck I telescope. His work focuses on improving the instrumental calibration: calculating the astrometric distortion, installing the Precision Calibration Unit, and developing software to operate it. He has previously worked on radio surveys of molecular clouds, gravitational microlensing, and Antarctic astronomy.

Emily Martin

emilymartin@ucsc.edu

AstroTech Instructor 2022

Emily Martin is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz. She combines instrumentation and observations to answer scientific questions about planets and brown dwarfs. Emily is the PI of the PEAS instrument for Lick Observatory and she served as the Instrument Scientist for the NIRSPEC Upgrade for the Keck II Telescope. Her instrumentation expertise is in optical and infrared instrumentation, including optics, mechanics, and detectors.

Deno Stelter

deno@ucolick.org

AstroTech Instructor

Dr. R. Deno Stelter is a postdoc at UCSC where he works as the instrument scientist for SCALES (Slicer Combined with an Array of Lenslets for Exoplanet Spectroscopy). SCALES, an AO high-contrast integral field spectrograph, is currently in its Final Design phase.

Dr. Stelter was trained in the arts of advanced image slicer design and cryo-opto-mechanical engineering while in graduate school, and is passionate about astronomical instrumentation, regardless of whether or not slicers are involved.

Sean Terry

sean.terry@berkeley.edu

AstroTech Instructor 2022

Sean Terry is a Keck All-Sky Precision Adaptive Optics (KAPA) Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. He works on various PSF-Reconstruction techniques as well as high-precision astrometry of gravitational microlensing targets.