Research

My research interests lie in the general area of stars and stellar systems, especially as tracers for how galaxies (including our home, the Milky Way) formed and evolved over the past several billion years. In parallel, I have a long-standing passion for advancing new technology — both hardware and software — to open new pathways for astronomical discovery. This breadth is reflected in a publication record spanning high-impact astronomy and astrophysics journals and the technical literature, including SPIE proceedings (the international society of optical engineers).

My current focus is the application of modern data science approaches — including machine learning methods related to computer vision and topological data analysis — for exploration and discovery in large public datasets containing information on millions to billions of astronomical objects. Mathematically, this is akin to illuminating and exploiting structure in n-dimensional point clouds. Having spent much of my career building the observatories and data systems that produce these datasets, I am now turning my attention to extracting science from them directly. To that end, I am developing collaborations with AI/ML experts at UTSA and deepening my own expertise in this rapidly evolving area.

Much of my current work uses data from the ESA Gaia mission. I also plan to explore data from the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), the Dark Energy Survey (DES), and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) — all experiments I helped to advance while serving as Director of the U.S. nighttime, ground-based national observatory.

This focus area is an excellent framework for undergraduate research experiences since the skills developed have wide application beyond astronomy. Graduate students can also find fruitful projects in this area.

Publications
Refereed: 50 (29 as 1st, 2nd, or 3rd author) (h-index = 26)  
Non-refereed: 100+  
See also: ORCID: 0000-0002-7678-2155  

Key Words
Data-intensive astronomy
N-dimensional point clouds
Stellar populations in early-type galaxies
Stellar spectral libraries
Optical-IR observatories and associated systems