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LSST E-News

LSST E-News

October 2010  •  Volume 3 Number 3

Collaborator and Teammate: Eric Gawiser

Rutgers professor Eric Gawiser, co-chair of the Large-Scale Structure Science Collaboration Team.

He may be most familiar to LSST colleagues as an expert on large-scale structure and galaxies, but some of us have seen Eric Gawiser track down a soccer ball and pass it off to a teammate with the same fervor he brings to his research.

Eric is a member of the Galaxies science collaboration and co-chairs the Large-Scale Structure science collaboration with Hu Zhan. He runs a thriving research group at Rutgers University where he has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy since 2007. He arrived at Rutgers after postdoctoral positions at the University of California at San Diego and as an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellow and Andes Prize Fellow at Yale University. His education took him from one coast to another as he completed his A.B. in Physics (1994) at Princeton University and then a Ph.D. (1999) at the University of California at Berkeley. His fascination with cosmology began in high school, but he liked other subjects too. “As an undergrad, I double majored in Physics and Science Policy and was considering a policy career until it came time to apply to graduate school,” he says.

His LSST research has allowed him to circle back to the field of his doctorate: “I did a Ph.D. thesis in theoretical cosmology, studying the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and Large-Scale Structure. Then I moved into observational cosmology, studying galaxy formation using the world’s largest telescopes to see very distant young galaxies. Now in LSST I’m involved in the Galaxies and Large-Scale Structure science collaborations, where we’re using a mix of theory and simulations to prepare for the incredible LSST dataset. The Large-Scale Structure collaboration will measure the clustering of billions of galaxies to probe dark energy, modified gravity, dark matter, neutrino masses and the inflationary potential.”

At Rutgers he serves as principal investigator of the Multiwavelength Survey by Yale-Chile (MUSYC) collaboration and is involved in several related astrophysics surveys. He also teaches astronomy for non-science majors and is an Associate at the Hayden Planetarium. Eric defines one of the most satisfying aspects of his work as “mentoring the next generation of scientists.” He offers some advice to them: “Science is imperfect, with plenty of politics, but much less than other branches of academia. You need to strike your own ethical balance in terms of how much you’re willing to play the game and avoid making enemies, and how much you’re going to be the one to speak up when the Emperor has no clothes.”

About the trials of research, he notes, “Perhaps the most challenging aspect is knowing when it’s right, or at least right with high enough probability to publish. It takes a subtle mix of confidence and caution to be a good researcher — too much confidence and you’d publish things before doing enough checks to be sure they’re right; too much caution and you’d never declare it good enough to share with the world.”

But for Eric the scientific challenges can lead to great results: “LSST will be a revolution in our ability to measure the histories of cosmic expansion and structure growth. We will be able to use multiple probes and should get redundant results — when we don’t, it will identify systematic errors that need correcting. We’ll also be able to use the multiple probes to relax typical assumptions about what cosmology ‘must’ look like (essentially the Cosmological Principle that the Universe looks roughly the same in every direction and location) and test them instead. Maybe there won’t be any surprises, but if there are, that’s a possible Nobel Prize result!”

He continues, “The ambition of LSST is breathtaking — more than an order of magnitude advance in our knowledge of the Solar System, Galaxy, distant Universe, and of things that get brighter or dimmer with time at each distance. The volume of data is unprecedented, but we’ll be ready to handle it. LSST is definitely what I want to be working on over the next 15 years.”

Eric balances work with exercise by playing soccer twice a week as well as running and bicycling. “Soccer’s a great stress release. We’ve had mini-soccer tournaments at the last two LSST All Hands Meetings, which have really helped the collaborative spirit.” In the coming years, expect to see him and his LSST colleagues score a lot of goals!

Article written by Anna Spitz

 

LSST is a public-private partnership. Funding for design and development activity comes from the National Science Foundation, private donations, grants to universities, and in-kind support at Department of Energy laboratories and other LSSTC Institutional Members:

Adler Planetarium; Brookhaven National Laboratory; California Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon University; Chile; Cornell University; Drexel University; George Mason University; Google Inc.; Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Institut de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules (IN2P3); Johns Hopkins University; Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University; Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc.; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Los Alamos National Laboratory; National Optical Astronomy Observatory; Princeton University; Purdue University; Research Corporation for Science Advancement; Rutgers University; SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory; Space Telescope Science Institute; Texas A&M University; The Pennsylvania State University; The University of Arizona; University of California, Davis; University of California, Irvine; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Michigan; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pittsburgh; University of Washington; Vanderbilt University

LSST E-News Team:

  • Suzanne Jacoby (Editor-in-Chief)
  • Anna Spitz (Writer at Large)
  • Mark Newhouse (Design & Production: Web)
  • Emily Acosta (Design & Production: PDF/Print)
  • Sidney Wolff (Editorial Consultant)
  • Additional contributors as noted

LSST E-News is a free email publication of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Project. It is for informational purposes only, and the information is subject to change without notice.

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