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Users Committee

Introduction: The 12-person Rubin Users Committee stands throughout Rubin Observatory’s commissioning and operations phases. The committee is charged with soliciting feedback from the science community and recommending science-driven improvements to the LSST data products and the Rubin Science Platform tools and services. This committee reports every six months to the Rubin Lead Community Scientist and to the Rubin Observatory Director. The full charge to the Users Committee can be found at rdo-051.lsst.io.

Meetings and reports: Meetings of the Users Committee are (at least in part) open to any members of the Rubin community. A meeting calendar is posted below. Meeting announcements, connection info, and the twice-yearly reports are all available in the Rubin Community Forum (link to all Forum topics with the users-committee tag).

Contact: The Users Committee is open to suggestions and feedback from the Rubin community. Users Committee members can be contacted individually via direct message in the Rubin Community Forum, or all together by sending a direct message to the Rubin Community Forum group @Users-Committee or an email to RubinObs-Users-Committee@lists.lsst.org. The chair of the Users Committee and primary contact member is Matthew Holman.

 

Current Members

Igor Andreoni (he/him) – Neil Gehrels postdoctoral fellow at Joint Space-Science Institute (University of Maryland and NASA/Goddard). Expert in multi-messenger and time-domain astronomy. He is a member of the Zwicky Transient Facility collaboration and the Rubin LSST TVS collaboration.

Dominique Boutigny (he/him) – Staff Physicist at CNRS/IN2P3 Laboratoire d’Annecy de Physique des Particules (LAPP) in France. Science interest in Cosmology with Galaxy Clusters - Technical interest in image processing and large data processing infrastructures. Scientific Coordinator of Rubin data processing in France. Member of DESC.

Alessandra Corsi (she/her) – Associate Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Texas Tech University. Her research focuses on multi-messenger time-domain astronomy, with emphasis on gamma-ray bursts, core-collapse supernovae, and binary neutron star mergers. Her expertise is on radio follow-up observations of these explosive transients, and associated gravitational wave data analyses. She is a member of the Rubin LSST TVS collaboration, and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

Matthew Holman (he/him) – Senior Astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA; Lecturer at Harvard University.  Former Director of the Minor Planet Center.  Experience in solar system dynamics, algorithm development, surveys for small bodies in the solar system, searches for and characterization of exoplanets.  Member of the SSSC.

Alejandra Muñoz Arancibia (she/her) – Postdoctoral researcher at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics and Center for Mathematical Modeling, Chile. Experience in cosmological simulations of galaxy formation and evolution, models and observations of dusty star-forming galaxies, and data analysis of transients and variables in general. Member of the ALeRCE alert broker, DESC, and ISSC.

Qingling Ni (she/her) – Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Scientific interests in active galactic nuclei, the coevolution of black holes and galaxies. Experience in large-survey data analysis, wide-field optical imaging, photometric redshifts, and machine learning. Member of the AGN SC. LSSTC Data Science Fellow.

Markus Rabus (he/him) – Assistant Professor at the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción, Chile. Science interests from exoplanets to brown dwarfs and very low-mass stars using wide-field survey data, and time-domain astronomy. Member of the TVS-SC.

Francisco Javier Sanchez Lopez (he/him) – Postdoctoral Research Associate at Fermilab. Experience in galaxy clustering and weak lensing, blending, wide-field optical imaging, image processing, and large-survey data analysis. Member of the DESC.

V. Ashley Villar (she/her) – Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Institute for Computational and Data Science Co-hire at the Pennsylvania State University. Scientific interests in extragalactic time-domain astrophysics. Experience in large-survey data analysis, physical modeling of broadband optical light curves and machine learning. Member of TVS.

Anja von der Linden (she/her) – Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University, NY, USA. Science expertise in cosmology with galaxy clusters and weak lensing.  Technical experience includes data processing, photometric calibration, photometric redshifts, weak-lensing shape measurements, Bayesian inference techniques. Member of DESC.

Matthew P. Wiesner (he/him) – Assistant Professor of physics at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois. Scientific interests in gravitational lensing and searches for kilonovae associated with LIGO/Virgo alerts. Involved with DESC data challenges, including adding kilonovae to a subset of DC2 data. Member of DESC, SSSC, SLSC and GSC.  

Michael Wood-Vasey (he/him) – Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.  Science focus on supernova cosmology.  Technical interests in large-survey image processing, image subtraction, and data-intensive astronomical analysis.  Member of DESC and TVS.

 

Meetings Calendar

 

Meetings Minutes

Find the minutes of all Rubin Users Committee meetings, and all Users Committee reports, in the "Science" category of the Rubin Community Forum by searching for topics with the tags #users-committee (or use this link to go straight to the results of this search).

 

Financial support for Rubin Observatory comes from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Cooperative Agreement No. 1258333, the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science under Contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515, and private funding raised by the LSST Corporation. The NSF-funded Rubin Observatory Project Office for construction was established as an operating center under management of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA).  The DOE-funded effort to build the Rubin Observatory LSST Camera (LSSTCam) is managed by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC).
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 to promote the progress of science. NSF supports basic research and people to create knowledge that transforms the future.
NSF and DOE will continue to support Rubin Observatory in its Operations phase. They will also provide support for scientific research with LSST data.   




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